Katy Milkman: It's a story made for Silicon Valley. Back in 2017, in Santa Clara, California, two thieves targeted a local tech company. Their prize? GPS trackers. The burglars made off with approximately $18,000 worth of the devices. Thankfully, the company that had been victimized had software that was designed to track the GPS units, which were usually connected to shipments of bananas and other products. In a twist, that software was now being used to track the company's own stolen property. Within hours, the police had pinpointed the GPS devices to a Union City warehouse, but that's not all. Two of the trackers were on the move, accompanying the culprits on a joyride through the East Bay.
Imagine the thieves' surprise when law enforcement pulled them over and knocked on their car window. The two men were arrested, and their dreams of a lucrative heist were dashed by their own ignorance. In this episode, we'll look at how a blind spot in our recognition of what we know and what we don't know can get us into trouble, though hopefully not with the police. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.
Andrew Flack: Cecilia Jimenez is the gold standard of botched restorations because she was really the first that caught the imagination of the internet.
Katy Milkman: This is Andrew.
Andrew Flack: Hi, this is Andrew Flack, and I'm the librettist for the opera Behold the Man, a comic opera.
Katy Milkman: The opera Andrew is talking about—the one he wrote the libretto, or lyrics, for—is based on a true story from 2012, an event that took the internet by storm. You've probably seen this painting online at some point. The original fresco is in a church in a small town in Spain. The artwork, before the attempted restoration anyway, was of a traditional medieval-style image of Jesus with a crown of thorns, his head tilted to one side and looking skywards. The fresco was worn and weathered by water damage and age. It had been neglected for many years, but then Cecilia Jimenez entered the picture.
Andrew Flack: It was in late August 2012, and I was sitting at my dining room table in Denver, Colorado, and I saw a photograph of a woman, an elderly woman who seemed to be in great distress. And the story that accompanied that photo was of a woman by the name of Cecilia Jimenez from a small town in Borja, Spain, who had attempted the restoration of a fresco in her church. Not a very valuable one as it turns out, but a local artwork. It had deteriorated to quite an extent, and she was attempting its restoration and botched the restoration, and it was discovered. It made the news. It became a worldwide phenomenon.
Speaker 3: In a story that has stunned the art world, a pensioner in Spain has unintentionally destroyed a valuable nineteenth-century fresco of Jesus.
Translator: When the entire world found out about an 80-year-old Spanish woman who decided to restore …
Speaker 5: A bid to restore a nineteenth-century fresco in a Spanish church has gone horribly wrong.
Andrew Flack: Memes are circling the globe, and people are mocking her and making great fun of her for this botched restoration. And when I saw her face, she was just in such distress, and I thought, "Well, she didn't do this on purpose. This wasn't a willful act." Something went wrong here, and I wanted to know more.
Katy Milkman: Andrew did some digging specifically about this piece of art, which turned out to be called Ecce Homo, which is Latin for "behold the man." These are the words used by Pontius Pilate in the Gospel of John when he presented Jesus crowned with thorns to his accusers.
Andrew Flack: The fresco had been painted in 1930. The painting is maybe 24 inches high by 14 inches wide, 15 inches wide, and it was painted directly on the plaster. The proper technique of fresco painting is to mix the pigment with the plaster as it's applied, so the pigment is actually part of the plaster, and that wasn't the way that artist Elias Martinez worked that day. It was two hours. He spent two hours on this work. It was a gift. He was there on holiday. He was visiting. He thought he'd paint a portrait of the Ecce Homo on this column in the church. He did. It took him two hours, but it wasn't incorporated into the plaster. So of course, over the 70, 80, 90 years, it deteriorated. And it turns out that there was a water condition in the old church, the santuario, and it began to decay. It was a lovely little painting, but certainly not a priceless treasure that it was made out to be.
Katy Milkman: It's important to know where this story is set. Borja is a small town of less than 5,000 residents in the northeast corner of Spain.
Andrew Flack: It's about an hour from Zaragoza by car, and no train service there. Or I think there is a bus, but it doesn't run all that frequently. It's quite an isolated place. It's a sleepy village. It's mostly older people are still living there. Cecilia, I don't think she was born there, but she lived her entire life there. She was married in the church where the Ecce Homo still resides. Her children were christened in the church, so she was really one of the matriarchs of the village.
Katy Milkman: And in that tiny village, a drama was unfolding. One that would soon become famous around the world.
Andrew Flack: I know for a fact that Cecilia loves this painting and that she's lived with this painting her whole life. And so over the years, Cecilia would go in and chip off little bits and repaint it. And so this was an ongoing project really. Everybody knew she was doing it and she had been working on little pieces to restore for years until it got to the point where the flaking and the peeling and all of the deterioration had gotten to the point where she really needed to get down to that next level. And I think she was using a putty knife and tools to remove some paint before she could apply her paint.
Well, she did that, and it took a lot of paint off. She's not a professional art restorer. She's not a portraitist. She's an amateur landscape painter who makes nice paintings. I'm not a painter, but I do know enough that to say that there are vastly different techniques in restoring something, restoring a portrait, and painting a landscape. Not only wasn't she fully qualified, but she didn't have the proper materials to engage in this process. She was in over her head for sure, but it was her belief that she would find the resolve and the resources within her to do this restoration.
Katy Milkman: So one, Cecilia wasn't trained in art restoration. Two …
Andrew Flack: Cecilia's eyesight isn't very good, and she's very forthcoming with that. Her eyesight hasn't been good for years, and her sister, who I've met several times, was not in agreement for her to do this. Her sister was kind of saying, "Cecilia, I think this is too much for you to do." But again, it was Cecilia's belief that she could help this painting that she loves so much. She could help it be restored and be appreciated again.
Katy Milkman: And even though Cecilia made it clear to everyone that she hadn't completed her restoration, at a certain point, it became apparent that things weren't going as planned. Rather than a vibrant restoration of a painting portraying Jesus Christ, the Ecce Homo looked more like a child's painting of a lion? A monkey? Suffice to say it did not represent the original image well.
Andrew Flack: She was horrified because she realized that what she had done wasn't acceptable, and her neighbors were quite cruel to her really. They didn't think this was funny that this happened. This was an embarrassment to the small town. It was a stain really. And Cecilia as being one of the women of the community felt so badly that this had happened. This incident took place in 2012 during a time when Spain was in terrible straits economically, and 40% unemployment. And the indignados were taking to the streets in Madrid and Barcelona. It was a difficult time financially, so the backdrop of the opera against the Great Recession is very important.
Katy Milkman: Behold the Man is a comic opera Andrew wrote with the composer Paul Fowler about Cecilia's story. They felt it was the right medium to tell this very modern but also timeless tale.
Andrew Flack: Opera is a very dramatic art form, and it has opportunities for magic. It has opportunities for great highs and great lows emotionally. It has a very wide spectrum of emotional impact, and that's the story we tell in the opera is that all this stuff happened, and she was hunted like Frankenstein's monster, and the people with those pitchforks and the fire went chasing after her, which is very operatic. But the truth is that in the end, she forgave all those people because that's her nature, and it's her nature that we're telling about in this opera. Cecilia's equanimity, her ability to forgive and accept. That's the story in Behold the Man.
Katy Milkman: Andrew hadn't yet traveled to Borja when he began working on the libretto for the opera.
Andrew Flack: I wrote the lyrics to "It's Faith That Guides My Brush" before I met Cecilia. And when I did meet her six, eight months afterwards, she recited to me almost word for word the lyrics that I had somehow used.
Katy Milkman: That wasn't the only surprise Andrew discovered. He found that while Cecilia might have ruined a painting, she helped to save her town's economy.
Andrew Flack: Here she had ruined something that really wasn't valuable in the first place, but the resulting tourism and the resulting mania that was created online and in the press, people take pilgrimages to see this amazing little small fresco in a church difficult to get to, miles and miles from anything really in Aragon.
Speaker 6: A Spanish woman who's botched attempt to restore a fresco of Jesus Christ drew ridicule online seems to be the one laughing now. All the way to the bank, that is.
Speaker 7: It was the face that launched a thousand tweets. The reworking of the Ecce Homo fresco has become a money spinner for the town of Borja in the northeast of Spain. It has attracted …
Andrew Flack: There have been over 300,000 people come to this little town, and so she feels like it's a miracle now.
Katy Milkman: Andrew Flack is the librettist for the comic opera Behold the Man with composer Paul Fowler. The opera was most recently mounted in Las Vegas with hopes for a full Spanish language production soon. You can find more details about the opera and the story of Cecilia Jimenez and the Ecce Homo in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
While Cecilia's story and the story of the hapless criminals at the beginning of the episode, they both may seem like isolated and quirky events, but they point to an error in thinking that we're all susceptible to. Think back to a time when you or someone you knew took on a do-it-yourself project at home, and it seemed like it was going pretty well until, oops, then an expert had to be called in to fix things. Or maybe you took a class in a new subject in college and thought it was going swimmingly until you got your midterm grade, and then, yikes, you realized you were going to need to really buckle down to avoid a failing grade.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes this error we make in many different areas of life, and it was named in part for my next guest. David Dunning is an experimental social psychologist, author, and professor at the University of Michigan. David, thank you so much for coming on the show.
David Dunning: My pleasure.
Katy Milkman: Well, first I was hoping you could just describe the Dunning-Kruger effect.
David Dunning: The Dunning-Kruger effect, as it's come to be known, is simply the observation that those who don't have expertise don't have the expertise to recognize that they don't have expertise. They think they're doing just fine. Or rather, we all think we're doing just fine when we don't have expertise because we don't have the knowledge or the skill to recognize that we could be doing a lot better and that we're making mistakes.
Katy Milkman: It's a fascinating part of the human condition. I'd love if you could describe some situations where it might be particularly natural to observe this effect.
David Dunning: It's natural to observe this effect in a lot of different situations. Unfortunately, comes up in a lot of very consequential decisions in life. Buying a house, particularly your first house. Choosing maybe a spouse. We don't get to make that decision very often in life. Choosing a president, we drop in and we do that every four years. And in the hurly-burly of everyday life, we don't get to really ask the question, "Who's the best candidate? And oh, by the way, what does a president do?" So it can happen everywhere. It happens to all of us. So that's why I say it's part of the human condition.
Katy Milkman: I would love it if you could describe one or two of your favorite studies showing that this arises and that it matters.
David Dunning: The study that really made me believe that it is true is one study that we did where we brought students into the laboratory and gave them a logic quiz and offered to pay them up to $100 if they could accurately say how many of the 20 questions they got right. No one won the $100. Offering $100 compared to a control group did nothing to make their accuracy any better. That's one study, but there are other studies as well. So there's a group of medical teachers down at the University of Florida who tested over 1,100 medical residents going through their OB-GYN rotation and asked them, "You just took the exam at the end of your rotation. How did you do? How are you going to do in the class?"
And the students doing poorly, like getting F's and D's in the exams, getting a C minus on the rotation, thought they were getting B's, B pluses. They didn't think they were getting A's on average, but they thought they were doing quite well. People at the top getting A's, maybe they thought they were getting A minuses. So this is an area where it really matters. These are students who are going to go on to a medical practice, and those not doing well thought they were doing adequately well. It might've been a surprise to them when they got their grades. Well, if you've been a college professor, it's not a surprise to a college professor.
Katy Milkman: OK, fair enough. When you think about this research in the context of the general finding that people are often overconfident, what are the key features that distinguish the Dunning-Kruger effect from general overconfidence?
David Dunning: Well, general overconfidence has many different flavors, and I'm pretty convinced by research that these flavors may not have anything to do with one another. People can be overconfident about whether or not their judgments are good or accurate. People can be overconfident about their place in this world. Are they really more ethical, healthier, better leaders than everybody else? More politically informed? The Dunning-Kruger effect is just a specific version of all this, which is that if you're less skilled, you're less skilled at knowing how skilled you are. So the calculations you're making are not going to be as good about how well you're doing. But you're going to make a decision. You're going to make an estimate. You're going to make a judgment. And of course, you're going to choose the one that seems the most reasonable. So all judgments float to optimism, and that's where you find the Dunning-Kruger effect residing.
Katy Milkman: That's really interesting. And you said a little bit about this in that response, but I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the cause, and the root cause, what you believe, and what the evidence suggests is driving this tendency when people really have the least knowledge to have this particular degree of overconfidence.
David Dunning: Well, I think it's interesting because sooner or later, I'm going to write an essay on does anybody really know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is? For a variety of reasons.
Katy Milkman: Hopefully you do since it's named after you.
David Dunning: Well, yeah. And by the way, Justin Kruger and I did not name it. Someone named it for us on the internet, but our analysis was just simply the observation that in a lot of areas of life, to know how well you're doing, to actually get to the Greek dictum of knowing thyself, you have to have skill in the first place. You have to have knowledge in the first place. To know if you're a good chess player, you have to be a good chess player already. If you're not, you won't know. My definition would be that people who are unskilled come to erroneous self-judgments and are overconfident about themselves because they don't have the skill necessary to judge themselves. The process is part of the definition. But I've had people saying, "No, you can't put in the process." And I kind of go, "Well, the process is the whole point." But I've literally had people argue with me that, no, the Dunning-Kruger effect is not what I'm saying is the Dunning-Kruger effect. And I kind of go, "Well, OK."
Katy Milkman: It's like giving birth to a child. You cease to control it from that moment on. But as an academic, we see it constantly because our whole life is about increasing our knowledge. And every time we undertake a new project, we think at the beginning, "Oh, this will be so easy, and I know so much." And then the more you dig in, the more you realize, "Oh, well, I haven't gone down that alleyway, and I haven't figured this out." And so it feels like a perfect explanation of the academic life. But I'm curious, what got you interested in studying this effect in the first place before it was named after you?
David Dunning: Well, I just find myself first and foremost as interesting in the psychology underlying healing misbelief. And I'm fascinated by the fact that a lot of the misbeliefs people hold are about themselves, that it's an intrinsically difficult task for people to know thyself. We're around ourselves all the time. How can we not know ourselves? So that's a theme that I keep coming back to in my research. And over the years, I just would run into people in my office, on the street, on the television. They were saying these outrageous things, and I kept wondering, "Don't they realize what they're saying is a little bit off? Why are they saying this so confidently?"
I just wanted to know how much insight people had in those situations, how much doubt they had about whether or not they had the right answer. So Justin Kruger came in and said he wanted to work with me, and I said, "Well, I have a high-risk/reward idea. I just want to know about whether people are getting something wrong. Do they have any insight, any doubt into whether or not they're getting something wrong?" And so we just decided to do the project, and we're actually blown away with how little insight people had about when they chose the wrong answer, that it was wrong. Thus, the effect, or at least the research was born.
Katy Milkman: That's really interesting. Is there anything you do differently in your life as a result of your research on this topic?
David Dunning: Well, yes, there is. I do consult more widely with people, especially when things are important. For example, I am much more open to mistakes. I'm much more willing to be sensitive to the idea of, "Oh, wait a minute, I need to do a mid-course correction here." A lot of life is preparation. I spend a lot of time in preparation and worrying about things. Now, when it comes time to do something, be confident. Absolutely. But when you're preparing, be a pessimist, be defensive. I'm a little bit more of a preparer than I used to be.
Katy Milkman: That's wonderful. I love that. And I think that's actually a perfect place to wrap. So let me just thank you so much for taking the time to talk today. I really appreciate it.
David Dunning: My pleasure.
Katy Milkman: David Dunning is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. You can find a link to his work with Justin Kruger on what came to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
One of the best ways to combat the Dunning-Kruger effect is to continually learn more about important topics where you might possibly be overconfident—say, when it comes to investing. And I might be biased, but listening to podcasts is a pretty enjoyable way to learn. In addition to Choiceology, Schwab has several other original podcasts. There's Financial Decoder, WashingtonWise, On Investing, and the Schwab Market Update. You can find them all at schwab.com/learn, along with a host of other educational resources.
David Dunning told us that the Dunning-Kruger effect is the observation that those who don't have expertise don't have the expertise to recognize that they don't have expertise. Whenever I think about this effect, I think about a famous graph that plots confidence on one axis and knowledge on the other. The graph has a very funny shape. It shows that people with limited knowledge of a topic, say, people who don't know much about how to play the game Go or how to wire a chandelier, they tend to have a lot of confidence in their knowledge in that arena. But then the graph shows that as someone's knowledge increases, perversely, their confidence declines. Put another way, the more you know, the more you know you don't know. It's only when people develop a fair bit of expertise that their confidence once again begins to climb, to match and finally exceed the novice's degree of confidence. The Dunning-Kruger graph, much like Cecilia's Ecce Homo, is quite popular on the internet. It's often used to shame people who aren't experts and foul up when explaining or attempting things that are hard.
But we didn't make an episode about the Dunning-Kruger effect so you'd have new memes to share to shame your friends. Instead, our goal was to highlight that we could all use a bit more humility when we're new to an endeavor. We've covered overconfidence on the show before, but the fact that it's particularly pernicious when we're in novice territory is a key point. Don't trust yourself to accurately assess how hard something will be if it's not in your wheelhouse. So what's the solution? How can you add a dash of humility to your judgments just when you need it? Whenever you're facing a novel task or a judgment where you're not an expert, remember to give yourself extra buffer.
If you're estimating how long it will take to repair your bathroom tiles, and tile repair is not your specialty, consider multiplying your estimate by a factor of five to 10 and making sure you're still up for proceeding under those circumstances. Or if you're not a professional artist, maybe ask an expert or two if they agree it's a good idea before volunteering to repair that portrait of your grandmother or the damaged fresco in your local church. A little humility can ensure you're better prepared for what lies ahead. To quote Confucius, "To know what you know and what you do not know, that is true knowledge."
You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack. Next time, we'll look at people's unhelpful tendency to prefer simple explanations, even when the truth is complicated. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 9: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
