1THE ALLURE OF FLUENCY
Why Things Look So Easy
WITH 450 SEATS, LEVINSON AUDITORIUM is one of Yale University’s largest lecture halls, and on Mondays and Wednesdays between 11:35 and 12:50, when my undergraduate course titled “Thinking” meets, nearly every seat is filled. Today’s lecture on overconfidence is likely to be especially entertaining, as my plan is to invite some students to come up to the front and dance to a K-pop video.
I begin my lecture with a description of the above-average effect. When one million high school students were asked to rate their leadership abilities, 70 percent assessed their skills as above average, and 60 percent put themselves in the top tenth percentile in terms of their ability to get along with others. When college professors were polled about their teaching skills, two thirds rated themselves in the top 25 percent. After presenting these and other examples of overly generous self-assessments, I ask the students a question: “What percentage of Americans do you think claimed they are better than average drivers?” Students shout out numbers higher than any of the ones they’ve seen so far, like 80 or 85 percent, giggling because they think they are so outrageous. But as it turns out, their guesses are still too low: the right answer is in fact 93 percent.
To really teach students about the biases in our thinking, it’s never enough to simply describe results from studies; I try to make them experience these biases for themselves, lest they fall prey to the “not me” bias—the belief that while others may have certain cognitive biases, we ourselves are immune. For example, one student might think that he is not overconfident, because he feels insecure sometimes. Another may think that since her guesses about how she did on an exam are generally close to the mark, she is similarly realistic when she assesses her standing with respect to her peers in leadership, interpersonal relationships, or driving skills. This is where the dancing comes in.
I show the class a six-second clip from BTS’s “Boy with Luv,” a music video that has garnered more than 1.4 billion views on YouTube. I purposely chose a segment in which the choreography is not too technical. (If you’ve already found the official music video, it’s between 1:18 and 1:24.)
After playing the clip, I tell the students that there will be prizes and that those who can dance this segment successfully will win them. We watch the clip ten more times. We even watch a slowed-down version that was especially created to teach people how to dance to this song. Then I ask for volunteers. Ten brave students walk to the front of the auditorium in a quest for instant fame, and the rest of the students cheer loudly for them. Hundreds of them, I am sure, think that they can do the steps too. After watching the clip so many times, even I feel like I could do it—after all, it’s only six seconds. How hard could it be?
The audience demands that the volunteers face them, rather than the screen. The song starts playing. The volunteers flail their arms randomly and jump up and kick, all at wildly different times. One makes up completely new steps. Some give up after three seconds. Everybody laughs hysterically.
THE FLUENCY EFFECT
Things that our mind can easily process elicit overconfidence. This fluency effect can sneak up on us in several ways.
Illusion of Skill Acquisition
The class demonstration involving BTS was modeled after a study on the illusion of fluency that can occur when we are learning new skills. In the study, participants watched a six-second video clip of Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk, in which he seems to be walking backwards without lifting his feet off the floor. The steps do not seem complicated, and he does them so effortlessly he doesn’t even appear to be thinking about them.
Some participants watched the clip once, while others watched it twenty times. Then they were asked to rate how well they thought they could do the moonwalk themselves. Those who watched the video twenty times were significantly more confident that they could do it than those who watched it just once. Having seen it so many times, they believed they’d memorized every little movement and could easily replay them in their heads. But when the moment of truth arrived and the participants were asked to actually do the moonwalk, there was absolutely no difference between the two groups’ performances. Watching Michael Jackson perform the moonwalk twenty times without practicing did not make you a better moonwalker than someone who had only seen him do it once.
People often fall for the illusion that they can perform a difficult feat after seeing someone else accomplish it effortlessly. How many times have we replayed Whitney Houston’s “And A-I-A-I-O-A-I-A-I-A will always love you” in our heads, thinking that it can’t be that hard to hit that high note? Or attempted to create a soufflé after watching someone make one on YouTube? Or started a new diet after seeing those before and after pictures?
When we see final products that look fluent, masterful, or just perfectly normal, like a lofty soufflé or a person in good shape, we make the mistake of believing the process that led to those results must have also been fluent, smooth, and easy. When you read a book that’s easy to understand, you may feel like that book must have also been easy to write. If a person hasn’t done any figure skating, she may wonder why a figure skater falls while attempting to perform a double axel when so many others pull it off so effortlessly. It’s easy to forget how many times that book was revised, or how much practice went into those double axels. As Dolly Parton famously said, “It costs a lot of money to look this cheap.”
Copyright © 2022 by Woo-kyoung Ahn
