David Dunning, a social psychology professor at the University of Michigan and best known for the “Dunning-Kruger effect”, talks in this new episode if the TrustTalk podcast about trust being a rational decision in an irrational world. He discusses the trust game used in economics, psychology, and sociology to test the extent to which people trust others. In the game, participants give money to an anonymous stranger and expect their trust to be honored. The experiment found that people are often more trustworthy than we would imagine, with the real percentage of people who give the money back being 80% or higher, which is higher than what participants expected.Dunning explains that people's behavior in the trust game is not solely driven by the possibility of losing the money. Instead, people are more concerned about the message their behavior sends and are emotionally involved in the situation. He suggests that personal judgments based on trust are important in even the most technical and national decisions, as seen in the failed negotiation between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in 1986.Dunning also discusses how the Dunning-Kruger effect played out during the COVID-19 pandemic, with people being overconfident and making missteps due to their lack of knowledge. He suggests that individuals and organizations can become more aware of their biases and misbeliefs by designating a devil's advocate to pick holes in their strategies, projecting themselves into the future to imagine potential disasters, and benchmarking their performance against other organizations. Additionally, individuals should be wary of their own biases and seek out expert opinions to improve their decision-making abilities.Source