Do You Really Know What You Think You Know?

Do you trust yourself too much?

Key points:

• Do You Really Know What You Think You Know?
• Research shows that we fail to consider if there is anything we don’t know when assessing situations.
• It is helpful to get into the habit of questioning whether we really have all the facts.

Do you ever confidently arrive at a conclusion based on inadequate information? This was the question I ended up asking myself, in light of some interesting research findings, which I am about to share. I definitely think of myself as someone who wouldn’t do that. I would carefully weigh up all sides of a situation before deciding that something is right or wrong or one thing is the cause or another. After all, this is the very thing I spend much time helping others do in therapy.

And then I read the research findings and was not so very confident after all.

As social psychologist Hunter Gehlbach, from Johns Hopkins University, and his co-researchers put it in their recent paper, “People fail to account for the unknown unknowns. Accordingly, they navigate their social worlds confidently assuming that they possess adequate information … often without pausing to wonder how much they do not know.

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