Did I Miss Anything?: Fremdschämen for $200, please.

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

- Charles Darwin

In college, I wrote for the school newspaper. It was a weekly column, not about news or politics or even campus events. I wrote not one sentence on social issues, sports, astrology, or self-help. I wrote a feature article.

It contained nothing of any substance or value. Looking back, this body of work amounted to a collection of sophomoric, lampoon-style junk that I thought was humorous. At the time, it might have been considered "amusing" among my friends and I know people read it. That makes it all the worse. When I moved on to another university, I picked up a column there too.

Today, each of those articles is neatly laminated and arranged by date in a beautifully constructed scrapbook that my girlfriend (now wife) made for me. The problem is that I will never show it to anyone.

Fast forward about 23 years. I was sitting in Jon "Cody" Sokolski's office in One Main for a meeting, during which he used a word that I did not know or understand at the time, but I smiled and nodded my head knowingly as to preserve dignity.

The word was "schadenfreude" and I went home that evening to look it up.
Schadenfreude is similar to many other German expressions used to describe a number of very particular emotional states fairly common in the English language. In this particular case, the combination of the German words schaden and freude, meaning damage and joy respectively.

By way of definition, this word describes a much more complex psychological concept, lacking a single-word counterpart in the English dictionary. Loosely translated, it's about pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. Not a very nice thing.

In the process of learning about schadenfreude, I uncovered many excellent German word/concepts that seem essential to describing a particular feeling that most humans experience at some time or another. For example, "schlimmbesserung" is a word for an improvement that makes things worse. And of course, there is "aufregen", which describes the feeling in your stomach when you wait in excitement or thrill when something is going to happen.

But why I came here today was to discuss something else called fremdschämen. It describes the embarrassment which is experienced in response to someone else's actions, but it is markedly different from simply being embarrassed for someone else. In particular it is different from being embarrassed because of how another person's actions reflect on us or because of how another person's actions make us look in the eyes of others.

Fremdschämen, as a noun, describes the palpable horror you feel for somebody that is oblivious to how embarrassing they truly are. In order for it to exist, it requires that someone who should feel embarrassed for themselves simply doesn't, creating that terribly uncomfortable feeling for the rest of us to endure, unless of course, you are the doer of the fremdschämen and then, by definition, you haven't a clue.

An example:

My newspaper days and more recent understanding of fremdschämen are connected. Terribly, terribly connected.

At a commencement ceremony for Parkland College a couple years ago, I had the honor of introducing the speaker, John Forman, Publisher and President of the News Gazette. I after reading his bio, I came to the appalling realization that he did some consulting work at my college newspaper during the exact same years I was writing my column. There remains a distinct possibility the Mr. Foreman may have been exposed to my blather, hence, ex-post facto fremdschämen. Latin and German mash-ups make for angst.

In reality, there is little chance the Mr. Foreman actually read my column, and even less of a chance that he would recall a title, much less the content. But still...

So here's the lead in to get you going:

Yes or No

Do you secretly worry that others will find out that you're not as bright and capable as they think you are?
Do you sometimes shy away from challenges because of nagging self-doubt?
Do you tend to chalk your accomplishments up to being a "fluke," “no big deal” or the fact that people just "like" you?
Do you hate making a mistake, being less than fully prepared or not doing things perfectly?
Do you tend to feel crushed by even constructive criticism, seeing it as evidence of your "ineptness?"
When you do succeed, do you think, "Phew, I fooled 'em this time but I may not be so lucky next time."
Do you believe that other people (students, colleagues, competitors) are smarter and more capable than you are?
Do you live in fear of being found out, discovered, unmasked?

Quiz courtesy of Dr. Valerie Young

If you said "yes" to most of these questions, and I think most of you did, don't worry. You are in good company. A 1984 study of randomly selected American psychologists reports that nearly 70% of them feel like imposters. There is even a name for it.

Imposter syndrome

There is a good Huffington Post article that explains:

"Half the time I don't really know what I'm doing," is a typical comment I hear from people who seek help for the problem. "If people knew my weaknesses, they'd see that I'm pretty incompetent." There are several reasons why this talented group of people (which is much larger than you might think) is so insecure:

1. They don't attribute success to their own positive qualities. "I got this far by luck." "I was in the right place at the right time." "I do well only because I have good people working for me."

2. They don't dwell on their achievements and keep raising the stakes higher. "I got that research grant but now I have to start thinking about the next one." "That performance went well but I have to do even better next time."

3. They have tunnel vision. They notice every instance where they think they should have done better or where they made a mistake. They then put a great deal of importance in what are usually minor flaws in their performance. On the other hand, they fail to notice, or fail to put sufficient importance on what they do well.

4. They discount their accomplishments. "I got a lot of applause but I didn't deserve it." "I got an award but no one realizes how little I deserve it."

5. They compare themselves unfavorably to others. Frequently they pick out the most outstanding people in their office or even in their field and judge their own performance accordingly. "They would have done a better job." "They earned more than I did."

The name "imposter syndrome" is based on research conducted in 1978 by psychotherapists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes.

As it turns out, a good number of people often have the belief they are "fooling" other people, "faking it" or getting by because they have the right contacts or are just plain "lucky." Many hold a belief they'll be exposed as frauds or fakes. The experts also think that women tend to internalize their feelings to a greater extent than men. Researchers therefore theorize that "if something goes wrong, women tend to blame themselves, whether or not they were, in fact, at fault. Men, on the other hand, more readily accept the fact that some things are beyond their control."

These are the people you want in your organization. They have skills and talents. Very few people get to significant positions without at least average abilities and talents in most areas and significant skill in at least a few. The down-side is that they tend to under-value themselves and that can bring about other less desirable side-effects such as over-working, long hours, and maybe even reluctance to engage in extreme cases.

That was the good news. Let's talk about the ones you have to keep your eye on. They are the people that never feel clueless and always know better than everyone else. If it is you, please let me know, so that I can be aware of how dangerous you are.

It starts out like this:

When we are young, each day in school we learned more, received praise and encouragement, and truly got better and smarter. If we went to college, the progression likely continued and at some point we may have become supremely convinced of our own awesomeness, all the while our parents tried to remind us in one way or another that “you don’t even know what you don’t know.”

Once we started maturing as a person (read: going to work 8 hours a day), we realize that there’s more to this discipline that we thought.

At this point, what we think we know starts spiraling downward. We start to become aware of the depth of knowledge we haven’t yet tapped. At a certain point, the two paths cross, and this is where humility kicks in.

You may go through the day thinking you have so much more to learn, but the fact is, you know more than you think you do. At this point, you start making much better development decisions because you’re slightly underestimating yourself. This is good and normal. It does not happen to everyone.

The Woebegone effect

You may have heard of Garrison Keillor through his books or through his very popular radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. During his show, set in the fictitious community of Lake Woebegone, life is pretty good. Keillor often says that "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average." I never got the strong women and good-looking men part. Seems to me they ought to have been flip-flopped.

Regardless, Keillor's depiction of the idyllic lifestyle has led to a phenomenon called the Woebegone effect. Simply stated, it is the tendency of people to overestimate their positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative qualities, relative to others. This is evident in a variety of areas including intelligence, performance on tasks or tests and the possession of desirable characteristics or personality traits. Heck, it even extends to driving ability.

Raise your hand if you are an above average driver. See, everyone has their hand up. Me? I'm a terrible driver and I'll be the first to admit it. I am easily distracted, especially on long trips and can't wait for the day that Google solves the autonomous car. Really. I can't wait. This is one of the reasons that there is mandatory car insurance.

In 1987, John Cannell completed a study that reported the statistically impossible finding that all states claimed average student test scores above the national norm. Hummm. By the way, how many "m's" are too many in the word hummm? The Urban Dictionary says three is just right.

One College Board survey asked 829,000 high school seniors to rate themselves in a number of ways. When asked to rate their own ability to "get along with others," a statistically insignificant number — less than one percent — rated themselves as below average.

Furthermore, sixty percent rated themselves in the top ten percent, and one-fourth of respondents rated themselves in the top one percent. Okay. Remember that they are high school kids and are still on the journey to awesomeness and fremdschämen. We can forgive, but what of the adults?

The real reason that, as an adult, you may feel like a fraud is because you have been successful in taking a lot of information from the "things about which I know nothing" category and moving it into the "things I know a little bit about" category. In the process, you realize that there is a lot of stuff you don’t know.

The good news is that this makes you very not dangerous. The bad news is that it also makes you feel dumb and self-conscious a lot of the time. For some, age brings wisdom, but for others, age comes alone.

Less competent, the more over-estimation of ability

Yes, there is a "syndrome" or "effect" for everything, and this is no exception. There exists something called the Dunning-Kruger effect and I have linked a paper here. It is a 14 page summary that describes a cognitive bias in which people perform poorly on a task, but lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance.

An example:

As a result, such people remain unaware of their incompetence and accordingly fail to take any self-improvement measures that might rid them of their incompetence. According to Dunning and Kruger:

"People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities."

It is important to make a distinction here between intelligence and self-awareness. In evaluating ourselves, we tend to start with preconceived notions about our general skill and then we integrate these notions into how well we think we are doing on a task.

For example, one might think, "I have never driven my car off the road (without provocation), only been in three accidents (none my fault) and amassed only a half-dozen moving violations, therefore, I am an excellent driver." You might disagree, as do the police in four towns in two different states.

I'll try to explain in pictures. Below is a figure taken from D and K's paper. The line with the circles represents (adult) performance on a test. This one happens to be a logic test. Note the fairly straight distribution, beginning with about 11% at the low end and around 87% on the top end. The other axis represents competency (as measured by this test) with the bottom quartile being the least competent and the top quartile as the most.

The line with the triangles represents how well each participant thought they would do on the test before taking it. The line with the squares represents how each participant rated their ability to think logically, again before taking the test.

Notice a couple things. First, there is a difference in all groups between perception of ability and perception about test results. All quartiles thought their ability was higher than the test results would show. Interesting.

Next, take a look at the bottom quartile. Look at the red line. There is an absolutely huge difference between perceived and actual ability, and not in a good way.

After comparing the student's own impressions with their actual performance, a clear pattern emerged in Dunning and Kruger's data: Worse students grossly overestimated their own performance.

You get a clear sense of the extremity of the poor student's fondness to overestimate their own performance, when you consider these results: For the bottom quartile, while their actual performance may have, "put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated their mastery of the course material to fall in the 60th percentile and their test performance to fall in the 57th".

Bottom performers tended to overestimate their performance by roughly 30%; a general pattern that has been replicated many times over since.

Similarly, "participants taking tests in their ability to think logically, to write grammatically, and to spot funny jokes tend to overestimate their percentile ranking relative to their peers by some 40 to 50 points, thinking they are outperforming a majority of their peers when, in fact, they are the ones being outperformed."

On the other hand, top performers tend to underestimate performance, as the green line illustrates.

As Dunning and Kruger point out that:

"This pattern also emerges in more real-world settings: among debate teams taking part in a college tournament and hunters quizzed about their knowledge of firearms just before the start of hunting season; among medical residents evaluating their patient-interviewing skills; and among medical lab technicians assessing their knowledge of medical terminology and everyday problem-solving ability in the lab."

Worried yet? Not so much. The vast majority of us are average. Yes, we are. Really. Look it up and be comforted in the fact that half the people you know are below average. Having said so, the blue circle represents the notion that those of us in the middle generally are realistic about our abilities, our perceived performance, and actual results bear it out.

Dunning and Kruger refer to a "double curse" when interpreting their findings. Those that fail to grasp their own incompetence, do so precisely because they are so incompetent. And since overcoming their incompetence would first require the ability to distinguish competence from incompetence, people get stuck in a loop.

"The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else's, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people's responses as superior to their own."

"Top performers tend to have a relatively good sense of how well they perform in absolute terms, such as their raw score on a test. Where they err is in their estimates of other people-consistently overestimating how well other people are doing on the same test".

Of course, I should also draw your attention to a footnote, as Dunning and Kruger cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers).

Why does this happen?

Well, it is a pretty good survival strategy to believe we can handle just about anything. Without some optimism and positive thinking, people wouldn't try anything new. New ideas wouldn’t be shared. In short, tempered confidence is required.

The problem, though, is that all of us have some tendency to overextend our confidence to an unsafe point, like messing with the electrical system in your home because you had an electricity class in 6th grade or maybe texting while driving. Or, more to the point, writing newspaper articles at 20 and a blog at 43.

Oh my fremdschämen...