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

Expert blind spot is a cognitive bias that affects highly educated people.

Learning any subject or skill can be a long, difficult and bumpy road. Whether it is acquiring a college degree, speaking a new language, or knowing how to cook, learning involves many steps, all of which are essential.

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

This whole idea comes to be what is known as the expert's blind spot, a cognitive bias that occurs in those people who have managed to acquire a Wide range of knowledge in a given knowledge. Let's take a closer look.

What is the expert's blind spot?

Let's think about the following situation: we are walking down the street and a man stops us, turning out to be an exchange student coming from the United States. The guy asks us to teach him how to speak Spanish, to which we say yes. We become his friend and arrange a few days a week to give him "classes". After several weeks of trying to teach him things we see that he has only learned the most basic phrases and a few words and that's when we ask ourselves, where did we go wrong?

We do a review of 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 pick them up the first time. We have thought that his acquisition could be done by the natural method, simply by "catching" in which situations it is appropriate to use one verb form or another. We insist on it and we see that we are stuck, that he does not learn any more.

One of the most common problems when learning languages (and any other subject) is relying on native speakers of the target language to be experts at teaching their own language.. Actually, we can be sure that Spanish speakers are experts at speaking it: they know when to use the verb tenses, the appropriate vocabulary for each register and situation, how to maintain a fluent and rich conversation... but what not all of them know is how to teach their own language, since they lack the pedagogical tools to teach it to a native speaker of another language.

This whole hypothetical situation describes an example of what would be the expert's blind spot, which is the cognitive bias that occurs when a person who possesses extensive knowledge of a particular subject or skill has lost track of how difficult it was for him or her to acquire that skill.. In this case the person who has attempted to teach Spanish to the American has ignored that he learned his native language after many years of being immersed in it, hearing it at home and studying it further in 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 a truism that one cannot teach what one does not know, that is, what one does not have in-depth knowledge of. However, and as we introduced with the previous example, the fact of having a wide mastery in a certain subject or skill is not a guarantee that we are capable of teaching it in conditions, in fact, it is even possible that it makes it difficult for us to teach if we do not know exactly how to do it.

The idea of the expert's blind spot, which, as we have mentioned, is the situation in which a person knows a lot about a subject or skill. the situation in which a person knows a lot but does not know how to teach it, is an idea that may at first glance seem to be a bit of a misconception.is an idea that may seem counter-intuitive at first glance, but, both taking the above example and things that happen to us in our daily lives, it is quite likely that more than one of us will feel 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 to a place before or practice a sport that we are very good at and we have not been able to explain it well. 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 substratum of knowledge of a given subject gives us an advantage, in that we know more, but at the same time it makes our mind a bit more "scrambled", with a tangle of threads that represent the different knowledge that we have internalized but do not know how to unravel in a pedagogical way for a person who wants to learn.

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

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 he/she has just started to learn.The person is in a situation of unconscious incompetence. The person knows very little, so little that he/she is not even aware of how much he/she has yet to acquire and how little he/she really knows. He does not have enough knowledge to determine his interest in the knowledge he is acquiring, nor to appreciate the importance it may have for him in the long run.

His ignorance can lead him to fall victim to a curious psychological phenomenon: the Dunning-Kruger effect. This particular cognitive bias occurs when the person, even with very little knowledge, thinks he/she is an expert, ignoring everything he/she does not know and even believing he/she has the capacity to discuss at the level of an expert on the subject. This is what in Spain is colloquially called "cuñadismo", that is, showing the attitude of someone who pretends 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 something new.especially when they have just started some kind of course and they have the feeling that what they are being taught is very easy, underestimating the real difficulty of learning.

2. Conscious incompetence

As we progress in learning, we realize that we don't really know much and that we still have a lot to learn. It is here that we enter a moment in which we become aware of our incompetence in that subject, that is, 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 had originally thought..

At this point we begin to estimate our options for mastering the subject and how much effort we will need to invest. We start to consider the value of that particular knowledge, how long the path is, and whether it is worthwhile for us to continue. This evaluation of our own ability to continue progressing and the importance we attribute to the acquisition of that knowledge are the two most important factors that condition the motivation to continue learning.

3. Conscious competence

If we decide to continue being in the second phase, sooner or later we enter the third phase, which is reached after 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 in explaining it, or very careful in testing our skills, being afraid to make mistakes. or very careful in testing our skills, being afraid of making mistakes.

4. Unconscious competence

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

The expert has so much knowledge that he can perceive things that people who are not experts in that subject 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 in a more automatic way. His perception, imagination, reasoning and memory operate in a different way.

Ironically, the opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect occurs at this stage: the impostor syndrome. The person knows so much, so much that, as we said, he thinks automatically and by inertia and, as a result, 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 this have to do with the expert's blind spot?

Well, the truth is that it has a lot to do with it. 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 we perform related to them. The more practice and knowledge we have, the easier it is for us to do things. Something that used to take us a long time to do now takes just a few minutes..

Let's go back to the example at the beginning. All of us who speak Spanish, are we all the time thinking about how we should structure sentences grammatically correctly? Are we aware of how we should pronounce each phoneme of each word? When we say "casa" do we literally say "c-a-s-a"? Perhaps a young child will be careful not to mispronounce sentences or make mistakes in the sounds, but a native adult will certainly speak much more naturally and fluently.

As adults we skip all those steps because we rarely make a mistake in pronunciation or make a grammatically strange sentence. We have internalized speech. However, we must understand that at some point in our language learning we had to go through these processes because if we had not been aware of them we would never have internalized them or learned to speak properly. The problem is that we do not take this into account when we grow up and, although with good intentions, when it comes to teaching the language to a foreigner we do not know how to do it.

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

This, of course, 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, etc. overestimate the ability of their students to learn the subject matter. These teachers have so internalized the knowledge they teach that they do not give due importance to some steps, thinking that the students already know or will quickly understand them. It may happen that they see their students as "little experts" and the teacher ends up omitting steps that, in reality, are crucial.

With all this in mind it is essential that when designing the educational curriculum, the real learning pace of the students is taken into account, not presupposing anything and making sure that the teacher does not assume anything.The blind-spot bias of the learner, 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 bias of the blind spot of the expert is like a curse of the one who knows a lot, who knows so much that he does not know how to explain it, and a good teacher is, above all, the one who knows how to share his knowledge.

Bibliographical 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, pp. 247-296). Academic Press.
• Bransford, 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. E. (2014). What makes great teaching? Review of the underpinning research.