Why It's Hard For Us to See Our Own Problem Habits
We're often blind to our own self-defeating behaviors.
LAST WEEK I wrote an article for Time magazine about the differences between reading on paper and reading on screens.
In that article, I talk about a 2024 study that found students scored better on reading comprehension tests when they read short stories on paper, as opposed to on a 13-inch laptop.
The study was small, but its findings are in line with a lot of previous work. Research dating back to the 1980s has found that printed text usually beats out screen-based text when it comes to a reader’s comprehension and retention of the material. Some have termed this “the screen inferiority effect.”
Like many of those older experiments, the 2024 study I wrote about used eye-tracking technology, which revealed that readers were much more likely to skim a text when reading on screens. Screen readers also spent a lot more time looking back over the text when it came time to answer simple questions about what they’d read. (If you want to know more about why these differences emerge, check out my Time article.)
Without immediate and objective feedback, people are often poor judges of their own performance.
I spoke with one of the authors of that study, the University of Oslo professor Marte Blikstad-Balas. She said that, apart from the headline findings of her research—that screen reading tends to be faster and “shallower” than reading in print—one other thing really jumped out at her:
“When we asked the students, they said they believed they were equally good in both conditions,” she told me. “That took me by surprise because, observing them, we could see them struggling so much more in the screen condition. But they would say, no, it’s the same. Most of them didn’t seem to realize that they were reading very differently or that they were having a harder time finding answers or thinking about the content [in the screen condition].”
In other words, the students had a blind spot when it came to assessing their own reading performance. Unfortunately, these sorts of blind spots turn up a lot when researchers ask people to judge their own performance or capabilities.
Studies on multitasking, for example, have found that those who do it a lot tend to rate their multitasking ability as above average, even though they usually under-perform those who seldom multitask. “The people who are most likely to multitask harbor the illusion they are better than average at it, when in fact they are no better than average and often worse,” said University of Utah Professor David Strayer, one of the authors of that study, in a press release.
In the paper detailing his findings, Strayer and his colleagues attribute some of this to the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which is the tendency of people with low ability to overestimate their level of skill or competence.
Evidence of the Dunning-Kruger effect has turned up in the realms of business leadership, politics, academics, medicine, and pretty much every other domain where someone has gone looking for it. Again and again, researchers have discovered that when people lack immediate and objective feedback, they tend to be poor judges of their own performance. Making matters worse, the least capable tend to be the most delusional about their ability.
There are a lot of theories about what causes the Dunning-Kruger effect. One of the most widely cited has to do with human “metacognition,” which is our awareness of our own thinking and thought processes. The metacognition theory holds that people who are bad at something may not have developed enough skill to recognize their own ineptitude.
When I spoke with Blikstad-Balas, she mentioned these sorts of metacognitive shortfalls as one reason why students don’t notice how reading on a screen lowered their comprehension of a text. But these were only part of the story.
“If people are always reading in this very shallow condition, they will become used to that,” she said. “Their brain will adapt and it will think this is what reading is—going fast, skipping words, doing it as quickly as possible—and they won’t see how this creates difficulties for them.”
Essentially, she’s saying that the screen readers had developed a bad habit, and the presence of this habit and its associated brain adaptations made it difficult for them to notice the problems it was creating for them.
Poor performers in many social and intellectual domains seem largely unaware of just how deficient their expertise is. Top performers tend to underestimate their performances.
In The Habit Trap, my forthcoming book, I explain how habits change the brain’s activity patterns by building up and reinforcing the sorts of adaptations Blikstad-Balas is talking about. These adaptations allow us to slip into our habits easily, with little thought or effort. This makes our habits very efficient. But these adaptations also produce the sorts of behavioral blind spots that kneecap our abilities and hinder our performance.
Wendy Wood, a professor of psychology and business at the University of Southern California, has shown that compared to people with relatively weak habits, those with strong habits are much more likely to say that their behaviors are aligned with their goals. But once again, these self-assessments were off. A person’s behaviors and their goals were actually more likely to line up among the people with weak habits, as opposed to those with strong habits, her research found.
One reason for this is that the stronger a habit becomes, the more likely we are to default to it—regardless of its suitability to the task at hand—and the less able we are to recognize its shortcomings. For better or worse, our habits feel right to us. They are our comfort zone.
Even when people are presented with evidence that their habits are a poor fit for their objectives, they’re often reluctant to accept the evidence—and in some cases will come up with stubborn or absurd justifications for their habitual behavior. (In the same way that problem drinkers often deny that alcohol has become an issue for them, researchers have found that doctors will defend their own problem prescribing habits even when it’s clear to everyone else that their practices are inappropriate or out of date.)
“People with strong habits process information in ways that reduce the likelihood that they will consider acting otherwise,” Wood told me when I spoke with her. The stronger a habit becomes, the more its associated brain adaptations make it difficult for us to notice its flaws or pursue better ways of going about things.
There are two important lessons we can all take from this work.
First of all, people are often bad judges of their own skill or performance.
You may assume that if something’s not working for you, you’ll take notice and make a change. But decades of research on human performance have revealed that unless you’re doing something that provides immediate and objective feedback—something like playing a ball sport, where you’ll know right away if your technique succeeds or fails—it can be very difficult for you to recognize how a flaw in your approach or execution is holding you back. That’s doubly true if the behavior in question—whether it’s multitasking while you work or doing all your reading on screens—has become an entrenched habit.
The second lesson is closely related to the first, but may be a bit harder to swallow: Those of us who are the most sure of our abilities and processes are often the most likely to be fooling ourselves.
As David Dunning himself once wrote about his namesake Dunning-Kruger effect, “Poor performers in many social and intellectual domains seem largely unaware of just how deficient their expertise is.”
“Top performers,” he added, “tend to underestimate their performances.”
As I explain in my book, this is partly because top performers don’t default to mindless habits. They tend to adjust their behavior to meet the demands of the moment. This may not feel as natural and easy as slipping into a habit—hence the mismatch between their actual and perceived performance—but it often produces better results.
One way to combat these sorts of self-assessment failures is to continually experiment with different techniques and approaches. This can help reveal problem blind spots and other hidden pitfalls in your methods. It’s also a good way to keep your habits weak and your behavior flexible, which allows you to adapt to changing circumstances.
Whenever possible, it’s also helpful to bring in outside feedback. Especially if something you’re doing is important to your personal goals or professional success, relying solely on your own judgment is asking for trouble.
All this should serve as a good reminder to stay humble, and to be open to coaching or constructive criticism. As many of us have learned the hard way, it’s often when we’re riding high and think we have everything figured out that the rug gets pulled out from under our feet.