Hubris Kills – Education Saves Lives

“At the peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve, individuals with limited knowledge or skills in a domain tend to overestimate their competence. However, as they learn and gain experience, they become more aware of their limitations and realize that their initial confidence was misplaced.”

As with many things in psychology, the things that we think about ourselves and our abilities are often incorrect or exaggerated. The Dunning-Kruger effect, described above, demonstrates this principle. The effect of this facet of human psychology is that we tend to assume that we are much better at things than we actually are.

Drivers suffer from this effect to an exaggerated degree. According to a study by the National Library of Medicine, over 80% of drivers would rate themselves above average at driving. That is statistically impossible, and it demonstrates how the Dunning-Kruger effect manifests itself in driving.

I’ve personally experienced this phenomenon. Once, when I was eleven, my mother got into an accident driving me to school. We lived in a sleepy rural town in Maine at the time, and at seven in the morning there were only a handful of cars that would pass by. There was a curve in the road where the “Yield” sign had fallen off years ago and never been replaced, and while she did have the right of way, cars would blast past with no care whatsoever. On that particular morning, she was texting with one hand and not looking at the road when she executed the turn. I don’t blame my mother for hitting the car – it was in the road when it shouldn’t have been, and she’d done that drive half a million times in the years prior. But nonetheless, her eyes were on her phone and not on the road, and the only thing at the wheel was muscle memory. As we sat on the side of the road and waited for the police to come to file a report, and I missed the first hour of school, I realized the power that my mother wielded every day when she sat behind the wheel of a car. I realized the utter disregard for the danger that she put herself in, and it scared me. In the words of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”

If most drivers rate themselves above average at driving, and people are more likely to overestimate their abilities when they have limited education, then it logically follows that most people are uneducated on the limitations of their driving abilities. How do you combat this?

Well, the Dunning-Kruger curve is called a curve because once an individual receives education on a subject, they rate their abilities lower, until they hit the point where their estimation of themselves is in line with their abilities. This means the solution is relatively simple – educate people on the dangers of driving, and they’ll realize that they are worse drivers than they originally thought they were.

Nobody wants to be a bad driver. Once people realize that they are worse drivers than they thought they were, they’ll get better at driving. They’ll doubt their ability to pull off that turn, or they’ll check their blind spot before backing up, or they’ll drive a little slower on the highway. They’ll make sure that everybody is buckled in before they pull out of the driveway, or turn their headlights on in foggy weather, or get their tires changed before the snow front hits. Most of all, they’ll feel less safe multi-tasking in the car, and will do it less often.

It can feel incredibly daunting to implement safer driving practices. Everybody leads a difficult and busy life, and the last thing anybody wants to do is listen to somebody lecture them on something that they do every day, multiple times a day, and have done for years. “More Driver Education Means Better Drivers” isn’t a concept that’s difficult to understand, but it is a daunting one. However, the most effective solutions are often the most simple ones. Drivers don’t actually need to be educated on anything except their own limitations to get better. Once a person recognises their own limitations, they will implement subconscious safer practices on their own driving.

The solution to creating safer roads is simply to educate people on principles in psychology like the Dunning-Kruger curve, and how that relates to driving, so that they can recognize their own hubris. Once they know that, the work will do itself.