Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know

In 2015, someone started an online petition for Halla Tómasdóttir to run for the presidency of Iceland. Tómasdóttir was taken aback. She was successful and had strong leadership skills, but she didn’t feel prepared to be the president of a country. Despite her friends’ and family’s encouragement and her strong qualifications, her imposter syndrome prevented her from running for months. When she did enter, it was against a stacked field, one which included Davíð Oddsson, the man widely believed to be responsible for Iceland’s bankruptcy.

Grant uses this anecdote to explain that although “confidence and competence [theoretically] go hand in hand […] they often diverge [in practice]” (37). He likens it to football fans who “armchair quarterback” after the games, insisting that they know more than the people on the field. In this case, despite Oddsson’s failures, he still believed he was the right person for the job, and despite Tómasdóttir’s successes, she believed she was not.

Tómasdóttir’s imposter syndrome and Oddsson’s armchair quarterback syndrome are encapsulated by the Dunning-Kruger effect, first proposed by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. This effect suggests that people who are particularly weak in an area are most likely to overestimate their abilities in that area.