We’ve decided to sift through the overwhelming reams of papers and journals out there, to bring you a compilation of psychological insights you should take note of when reflecting on your work life in general and definitely when planning your career moves.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
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After knowing what you want to do, the most natural thing is to start assessing how good you are at it. And, formal qualifications and certificates aside, this is a lot easier said than done. What might surprise you is that a major obstacle in evaluating your skills could be yourself!
Back in 1995, a person robbed two banks after he covered his face in lemon juice. Thinking it would make his face invisible (because it is used to make invisible ink) to surveillance cameras. He was surprised when he finally got arrested. This man alerted psychologist David Dunning and consequently, his graduate student Justin Kruger, to a discovery they later termed the Dunning-Kruger effect. They even preface their paper titled ‘Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments’ with this story.
The study concluded that we tend to overvalue our skills at the things we’re more incompetent at. Meaning, the more you’re bad at something, the more you’re likely to think you’re really good at it. So, before you jump to conclusions on how good you are at something you’re still an amateur at, think rigorously about how you’re going to evaluate your competence at it.
The Sunk Cost Fallacy
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The sunk cost fallacy is about not knowing when to let go. Would it be a good idea to continue pursuing something that is no longer doing you any good just because you’ve already invested a lot of time and money in it? Of course it wouldn’t.
Sunk cost is unrecoverable cost; it’s what you’ve already spent and cannot retrieve. The sunk cost fallacy or effect occurs when we stick to something that is no longer beneficial to us because of how much we’ve invested in it. Worryingly enough, evidence surfaced last year that suggests we tend to succumb to this error in judgement even when we weren’t the bearers of the sunk cost.
The End Of History Illusion
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The musicians you love, the interests you’ve grown, and the dream job you’re so passionate about might feel like constants in life. They’re the things that you’re so sure of that seemingly will never change no matter what happens to you or around you. The End of History Illusion, however, suggests otherwise.
It discovered the concerning tendency we have of underestimating how much we or things in general change in the future. “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished,” said Dan Gilbert, one of the American social psychologists who worked on the research, in a recent TED talk where he presented the audience with the study’s findings.
How do you think one can avoid falling into these career path road holes? Share with us!
