We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know – And That’s the Problem

Have you ever been in a conversation about climate change with someone who is absolutely, 100%, no-doubt-about-it certain that it isn’t happening? No hesitation and total confidence?

There’s actually a name for this behaviour. It’s called the Dunning-Kruger Effect*, and once you know about it, you’ll start seeing it everywhere.

Here’s the basic idea. When we know very little about a topic, we don’t know enough to recognise our own gaps. So we feel confident. As we learn more, we start to see just how complex the subject really is and our confidence actually drops.

It’s kind of like:

Beginners → ‘This looks easy, I totally get it!’

Experts → ‘Okay. There’s so much I don’t know…’

Climate change is a perfect Dunning-Kruger battleground. Someone who has watched a few YouTube videos or read a handful of headlines can feel completely equipped to dismiss decades of peer-reviewed science. And the more confidently they say it, the more convincing they can sound. Makes you want to almost doubt yourself.

So what do you do when you’re faced with that person at a dinner party, in your office, or across the dinner table?

Start with what you have in common. Because here’s the thing – almost everyone, regardless of where they stand on climate change, wants the same basic things. Clean air to breathe. Oceans safe enough to swim in. Healthy food grown in good soil. A world where their kids and grandkids can enjoy nature.

That’s your common ground, and it’s a much better place to start than an argument about data.

Something like: ‘I think we’d both agree we want clean rivers and healthy soil, right?’ Almost nobody is going to say no to that. And once you’re standing on the same side of something, the conversation feels a lot less like a debate and a lot more like a shared problem. From there, you can talk about the things you might be doing – planting trees, installing solar panels, reducing needless flights – not as a lecture, but a discussion.

Protecting clean air, healthy soil and thriving wildlife isn’t really a political position. It’s just common sense. And most people, when they stop defending a position and start talking about what they actually care about, find they agree on more than they thought.

* The Dunning-Kruger Effect was first described in 1999 by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Their research showed that people who lack skill in a domain often don’t realise how much they don’t know – which makes them more confident than they should be. Meanwhile, experts are more aware of the complexity of a subject, so they sometimes rate themselves lower than their actual ability.