Expert blind spot: what it is and how it affects people and education

Learning any subject or skill can be a long, difficult road full of obstacles. Whether it's acquiring a university degree, speaking a new language or knowing how to cook, they are all learning that involves many steps, all of them essential.

It often happens that as we become more skilled in certain knowledge and skills, we "forget" how much it cost us. learn, thinking that novices in this knowledge can omit some steps in which we do not realize that they are essential for their learning.

All this idea comes to be what is known as the expert blind spot, a cognitive bias that occurs in those people who have managed to acquire extensive knowledge in a certain knowledge. Let's take a deeper look at it.

• Related article: "Cognitive biases: discovering an interesting psychological effect"

What is the expert blind spot?

Consider the following situation: we are walking down the street and a man stops us, turning out to be an exchange student from the United States. The boy asks us to teach him to speak Spanish, to which we say yes. We become friends with him and set a few days a week to give him "classes". After several weeks trying to teach him things, we see that he has only learned the most basic phrases and the odd word and that is when we ask ourselves: what have we failed?

We review our “lessons”. We start with something soft, the basic phrases and vocabulary that he has learned, but then we see that we have jumped to the verb tenses, thinking that the American kid would grasp them the first time. We have thought that its acquisition could be done by the natural method, simply "grasping" in which situations it is appropriate to use one verbal form or another. We insist on it and we see that we have gotten stuck, that he does not learn more.

One of the most common problems when learning languages ​​(and any other subject) is trusting that native speakers of the target language are experts at teaching their own language.. We can really ensure that Spanish speakers are experts speaking it: they know when to use the tenses, the appropriate vocabulary for each register and situation, maintain a fluid conversation rich in topics... but what not everyone knows is how to teach their own language, since they lack the pedagogical tools to teach it to a native speaker of another language.

All this hypothetical situation describes an example of what would be the blind spot of the expert, which is the cognitive bias that occurs when a person who has extensive knowledge of a certain subject or skill has lost track of how difficult it was for them to acquire that skill. In this case, the person who has tried to teach the American Spanish has ignored that he learned their language. maternal after many years of being immersed in it, listening to it at home and studying it further at school. Unlike a Spanish teacher, the native speaker, even if he knows how to speak, does not know how to teach.

The model of expertise

It is obvious that one cannot teach what one does not know, that is, what one does not have deep knowledge of. However, and as we introduced with the previous example, the fact of having a broad domain in a certain subject or skill is not a guarantee of that we are able to teach it in conditions, in fact, it is even possible that it makes the task of teaching difficult for us if we do not know exactly how do it.

The idea of ​​the blind spot of the expert which, as we have mentioned, is the situation in which a person knows a lot but does not know how to teach it, is an idea that at first may seem counterintuitive but, both taking the previous example and things that happen to us in our daily lives, it is quite likely that more than one feels identified with this situation. Surely it has happened to us on more than one occasion that we have been asked how to make a dish, get before to a place or practice a sport that we are very good at and we have not been able to explain it to them good. It is a very common situation.

Our knowledge influences the way we perceive and interpret our environment, determining the way we reason, imagine, learn and remember. Having an extensive substrate of knowledge of a certain topic gives us an advantage, since we know more, but at the same time it makes our minds a little more "messy", with a tangle of threads that represent the different knowledge that we have internalized but that we do not know how to unravel in a pedagogical way for a person who wants to learn.

To understand the phenomenon of the expert blind spot We must first understand how the process that goes from the most extreme ignorance to expertise in a certain knowledge occurs., having the model proposed by Jo Sprague, Douglas Stuart and David Bodary. In their model of expertise, they explain that in order to have a broad command of something, it is necessary to go through 4 phases, the which are distinguished according to the competence acquired and the degree of awareness that is about the knowledge assimilated.

1. unconscious incompetence

The first phase of the model is the one that occurs when a person hardly knows anything about the discipline or skill that he has just begun to learn., being in a situation of unconscious incompetence. The person knows very little, so little that he is not even aware of how much he still has to acquire and how little he really knows. You do not have enough knowledge to determine his interest in the knowledge you are acquiring or to appreciate how important it may be to him in the long run.

Your ignorance can lead you to be the victim of a curious psychological phenomenon: the Dunning-Kruger effect. This particular cognitive bias occurs when the person, even having very little knowledge, believes a whole expert, ignoring everything he does not know and even believing in the ability to discuss at the level of an expert in the subject. It is what in Spain is colloquially called "cuñadismo", that is, showing an attitude of someone who appears to know everything, being sure of it, but in reality knows nothing.

Everyone is a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect at some point in their lives., especially when they have just started some type of course and they get the feeling that what they are taught is very easy, underestimating the real difficulty of learning.

• You may be interested in: "Dunning-Kruger effect; the less we know, the smarter we think we are"

2. conscious incompetence

As learning progresses, one realizes that he really does not know much and that we still have a lot to learn. It is here when we enter a moment in which we are aware of our incompetence on this subject, that is, that we realize that we are still quite ignorant. We have realized that what we have set out to learn is actually more complex and extensive than we thought at first..

At this point we begin to estimate our options to master the subject and how much effort we will need to invest. We begin to consider the value of that specific knowledge, how long the road is and if it is worth it for us to continue forward. This assessment of our own ability to continue to make progress and the importance we place on acquisition of this knowledge are the two most important factors that condition the motivation to continue learning.

3. conscious competition

If we decide to continue being in the second phase, sooner or later we will enter the third, which is reached after making a significant effort and dedication. In this phase we have become consciously competent, a situation in which we know how much we have learned, although we may be a little slow to explain it or very careful when testing our abilities, being afraid of being wrong.

4. unconscious competence

The fourth and final phase of the expertise model is the one in which we have unconsciously become proficient. What does this mean? It means that we have become experts in a certain skill or discipline, being very fluent and efficient when it comes to putting our knowledge into practice. The problem is that we are so competent that we are losing our ability to "explain" everything we do. It is not so natural that we skip steps that we consider unnecessary, we do things more quickly, we act as if by inertia...

The expert has so much knowledge that he can perceive things that non-experts in that field do not appreciate, and can reflect in a much more critical and profound way about different knowledge that is related to what he has learned. He can easily see relationships between different aspects of what he is an expert in, since having a broad domain he can find their similarities and differences more automatically. His perception, imagination, reasoning and memory operate in a different way

Ironically, in this phase the exact opposite effect of the Dunning-Kruger effect occurs: the impostor syndrome. The person knows a lot, so much so that, as we said, he thinks automatically and by inertia and, because of this, he is not aware of how much he really knows. Despite being an expert, she feels insecure in situations where her knowledge is required.

What does all this have to do with the expert's blind spot?

Well, the truth is that a lot. As we have seen, as we become experts in a certain subject there is a moment in which our knowledge and skills become something very internalized, so much so that we are not even aware of all the processes and actions that we carry out related to with them. The more practice and knowledge, the easier it is for us to do things. Something that before could take us a long time to do now only takes a few minutes.

Let's go back to the example from the beginning. All of us who speak Spanish are thinking all the time about how we should structure sentences grammatically correctly? Are we aware of how we should pronounce each phoneme of each word? When we say “house” do we literally mean “c-a-s-a”? Perhaps a small child will be aware of making the sentences wrong or making mistakes in the sounds, but of course a native adult will speak in a much more natural and fluent way.

As adults we skip all those steps since we rarely mispronounce or make a grammatically odd sentence. We have internalized speech. However, we must understand that at some point in our language learning we had to go through these processes since if we had not been aware we would never have internalized them nor would we have learned to speak properly. The problem is that we don't take this into account as adults and, although with good intentions, when teaching the language to a foreigner we don't know how to do it.

All this It allows us to reflect on how important it is for anyone who wants to teach something not only to know that something, but also to know how to teach it.. For example, language teachers must not only know how to speak the language they teach, but they must also know how to teach it to speakers of a specific foreign language, the age and level of the speaker in question and whether they have any difficulty in pronunciation associated with their mother tongue.

This, naturally, can be extrapolated to other subjects. One of the things that has been criticized in teaching is that many teachers who are experts in their subjects, such as mathematics, social sciences, natural sciences... they overestimate the ability of their students to learn the syllabus. These teachers have so internalized the knowledge they impart that they do not give due importance to some steps, thinking that the students already know it or will understand it quickly. It can happen that you see your students as "little experts" and the teacher ends up omitting steps that are actually crucial.

Considering all this It is essential that when designing the educational curriculum, the real learning rate of the students be taken into account., not assuming anything and making sure that teachers, in addition to being experts in the content they teach, are also experts in sharing it. The expert's blind spot bias is like a curse that he knows a lot about, that he knows so much that he can't explain it, and a good teacher is, above all, someone who knows how to share his knowledge.

Bibliographic references:

• Sprague, J., Stuart, D., & Bodary, D. (2015). The Speaker's Handbook, Spiral bound Version. Cengage Learning.
• Dunning, D. (2011). The Dunning–Kruger effect: On being ignorant of one's own ignorance. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 44, p. 247-296). Academic Press.
• Branford, J. D., Brown, A. L., & Cocking, R. R. (2000). How experts differ from novices. How people learn: Brain, mind, experience, and school, 31-50.
• Sakulku, J. (2011). The impostor phenomenon. The Journal of Behavioral Science, 6(1), 75-97.
• Nathan, M. J., Koedinger, K. R., & Alibali, M. W. (2001, April). Expert blind spot: When content knowledge eclipses pedagogical content knowledge. In Proceedings of the third international conference on cognitive science (Vol. 644648).
• Kalyuga, S., Chandler, P., & Sweller, J. (1998). Levels of expertise and instructional design. Human factors, 40(1), 1-17.
• Coe, R., Aloisi, C., Higgins, S., & Major, L. AND. (2014). What makes great teaching? Review of the underpinning research.