Cognitive Traps

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tursiops

Marine Scientist and Master Instructor (retired)
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Scuba Instructor
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It is difficult for new divers to self-assess their competence. Partly this is due to lack of knowledge or feedback about how they are performing, partly to cultural attitudes that success is always readily available, and partly due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is often stated as the inability to recognize one’s own incompetence, thus leading to inflated self-assessments. Paraphrased, if you are incompetent, you lack the skills needed to recognize that incompetence.

But there is another side to Dunning-Kruger: people with high ability underestimate their own ability, leading to the presumption that what they do so easily should be equally easy for all.

We see both these aspects of Dunning-Kruger on ScubaBoard, often in the New Divers or Basic Divers forums; examples: “I’ve got ten logged dives now, am I ready to go tech?” Or, recently, “Should I carry a pony bottle?” The first example question illustrates the illusory superiority of someone who does not yet know enough to make a good judgment on their competence. The second example question was a good question, but more than one respondent piled on with suggestions that back-mounted doubles, highly-trained teams, and conservative gas management would be better than a pony bottle, revealing the other side of Dunning-Kruger, namely that the responder had lost (or never had) any awareness that trained teams and managing back-mounted doubles was both a sledge-hammer approach to the question raised by the original query, and that a new diver – barely able to manage a simple single tank – was far from ready to approach the technical realm of equipment, trained-teams and gas management.

How to self-manage Dunning-Kruger?

We need (as both posters and responders) to be aware of overestimating our abilities and qualifications, and we need to be aware of “hubris,” i.e. overconfidence in our knowledge leading to arrogance.

You don’t give a brand-new piano player a Tchaikovsky Concerto to play right away, you work up to it. Our technical advice to new divers should be similar. Offer good advice, make them stretch, but don’t make it so far out of reach that only frustration results.
 
I'll just add to this post that when responding with advice, perhaps take notice where the OP is located before adding advice that might not relate to where the OP lives or dives.

This is an international forum despite most members residing in the US.
 
I think that many, if not all, on this forum would benefit from reading this. Is there a reasonable and polite way to pin this for easy access and reference?
 
In case this thread serves as a resource more broadly later, I hope to add a couple of things.

1.) Normalization of Deviance - this is often discussed on Scuba Board. You 'break the rules' a little bit from time to time, nothing bad happens, the rules then seem over-conservative, and in time you slowly but progressively push further past legit limits till you 'get burned,' so to speak. A problem is that in scuba diving, sometimes when that tipping point comes, it rapidly cascades into disaster.

I'm not saying nearly everyone rigorously adheres to every rule an agency lays down. Someone driving 60 mph in a 55 mph speed zone consistently for years, is not the same as someone who does that 6 months, then if all goes well moves up to 70 mph, and if he has no accidents or speeding tickets goes to 75 mph.

2.) Multi-Tasking Impairment in an Alien Environment. When things are going well, it's easy to forget how much more our minds' processing abilities are running background processing problems (e.g.: maintain buoyancy, be mindful of debt, stay off of and don't hit the reef with a fin, check and be mindful of gas supply, if buddy diving where is the buddy and does he look okay/close enough, monitor dive time, NDL, estimated gas time remaining (especially if an air hog on a guide led group dive). We are multi-tasking, and while we can do simple, routine things, if presented with a surprise 'challenge' it's surprisingly easy to get overwhelmed...and the house of cards goes tumbling down. I loose buoyancy control and sink while I shift focus to this problem...or start over-breathing my regulator, or...

On land, we stand on a 2-dimensional setting with no regard for what's above or below us most of the time. Buoyancy control is automatic; the ground does that for us. As I walk, there's no chance of kicking off another diver's face mask. My field of vision isn't reduced by a mask, and my hearing is much more useful for directionally localizing the source of sounds. We can talk to each other. There's not a 60 foot overhead wall of water between the surface and me with my dwindling gas supply. Heading up quickly on land doesn't put me at risk for a gas embolism or other nastiness. I don't need to equalize.

3.) Inert Gas Narcosis - whether nitrogen-based or not, it can impair cognition at depth without the diver being consciously aware.

4.) Bad Examples (and sometimes inflated 'by the book' expectations that don't jive with what they see). A common warning to parents could be phrased 'Your example is more powerful than your advice.' Ever see a post by a newbie asking if everyone really analyzes their nitrox tanks on boat trips, because that's not what he saw the other day? Or does everyone dive in lock step synchronicity with dive buddies, when on guide-led dives it sometimes looks like a loose group free-for-all?
 
Ahh, the Dunning-Kruger Effect a.k.a. the internet's favorite way to call someone you disagree with an idiot without calling them an idiot.

Dunning & Kruger's 1999 paper has to be the most unread, but over cited academic paper referenced on Scubaboard. I don't think I've ever seen a reference to Edward Nuhfer's paper which shows that both experts and novices will overestimate and underestimate their skills with the same frequency. Experts just do it within a smaller range.
 
Ahh, the Dunning-Kruger Effect a.k.a. the internet's favorite way to call someone you disagree with an idiot without calling them an idiot.

Dunning & Kruger's 1999 paper has to be the most unread, but over cited academic paper referenced on Scubaboard. I don't think I've ever seen a reference to Edward Nuhfer's paper which shows that both experts and novices will overestimate and underestimate their skills with the same frequency. Experts just do it within a smaller range.
LOL. I guess you didn't even read the second paragraph of my post....
 
How to self-manage Dunning-Kruger?

We need (as both posters and responders) to be aware of overestimating our abilities and qualifications, and we need to be aware of “hubris,” i.e. overconfidence in our knowledge leading to arrogance.

You don’t give a brand-new piano player a Tchaikovsky Concerto to play right away, you work up to it. Our technical advice to new divers should be similar. Offer good advice, make them stretch, but don’t make it so far out of reach that only frustration results.
:checkbox:
An extra 'like' , hubris. :wink:
Good analogy [brand-new piano] .
 
I read it. Further studies show both novices and experts over and underestimate with a similar frequency. Its not just novices over-estimating, and experts underestimating as you seem to posit in your first post.

Here is a link to Nuhfer's paper - worth a read when discussing self-assessment of skills vs. the tired references to the D-K Effect that gets trotted out far too frequently.
 

Things much more likely to be seen than DK​

Ignoratio Elenchi​

Personal Incredulity​

Appeal to Tradition​

Tu Quoque​

Bandwagon​

Begging the Question​

Anecdotal​

And a host of other formal and informal logical fallacies.
 

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