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“In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their [cognitive] ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.”

We’ve all met people like this, and we’ve all been those people. It’s where we all start when we begin to learn a skill. The challenge comes when we become convinced our knowledge is complete at any stage, but especially at an early stage when we are unable to more objectively assess our own ability.

A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing

Let’s start with an example.

Here is a scientific journal study asking a specific question:

Question: Is an individuals’ maximum bench press weight affected by doing the exercise on:
a) a solid traditional bench; vs
b) an inflatable ball.

The study concluded there was no difference in muscle activation between the two – i.e. benching on a bench vs swiss ball = no difference.

I showed this study to an Olympic and Commonwealth powerlifting coach I know. He understandably called the whole study “total b******t“.

Why is this nonsense?

In short, this coach said you only need consider the reality of the situation. With a very low weight, it may be a little tricky to balance but should be fine. But with any serious weight on the bar, e.g. 100kg for reps, it would likely be impossible to balance and stabilise your muscles enough to lift the weight safely.

Put simply, it makes zero practical sense for any moderately-skilled weightlifter to ask such a question.

If one had any meaningful real-world experience of weightlifting, to even ask whether a swiss ball and a bench could be equivalent for the bench press – let alone conduct an entire study and draw such a conclusion – is lacking in common sense. To the point that it begs the question whether the researchers are even qualified to operate as ‘experts’ in this field. And yet, they are peer-reviewed and published ‘experts’.

Bring it to the world of voice

Continue reading “Dunning-Kruger Effect: A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing”

The thing with being a voice coach and spending almost the entirety of every day immersed in voice, is that your ear gets exposed to so much music being made by many different kinds of people. Time, and the experience that comes therewith, is the great educator in this regard.

Things that seemed so exciting and interesting when you first begin, rapidly expose themselves to be a novelty. Things that maybe seemed a bit boring actually start to reveal a deeper nuance that we just weren’t sufficiently experienced enough to hear in the first instance.

Consider how our tastes in food and drink change as we get older. No longer do we want the supersweet desserts, but many gravitate towards to the darker, more bittersweet flavours in time. We don’t want pure unadulterated sweetness anymore – that blunt force novelty has worn off, and dark chocolate becomes more appealing. Some even move away from desserts altogether towards savoury things to finish the meal. Coffee or tea becomes less milky (even black) and we become less dependent on sugar or additives to be enjoyed.

The point is that time spent truly appreciating things leads to glacial change in our tastes and our ability to perceive things we never noticed before. It’s often imperceptibly slow, like a glacier moving down a mountainside. This same is true with our ears and our musical preferences as we get older.

As we spend time steeped in better and better music, your ear starts to hear things. It will begin to hear things it never heard before. You’ll hear things you were never capable of hearing prior to that. You’ll find yourself able to pick up on subtleties, as well as finding yourself actively seeking out depth of quality in singers, to a degree that the casual enthusiast can’t appreciate.

As such, when people ask me…

“What do you think of THAT singer?”

… you can hopefully see why this is a question with enormous scope if you spend all day every day soaking in music.

As a result of the training in the past, the profession I’m in, and just how I’m wired as a result, I’m not just hearing their voice or their music, I’m taking in a wide variety of different factors. I’m doing this whilst also trying to ignore factors that should not be relevant for the purposes of assessing a voice.

We as humans are far too swayed by psychological factors that skew our judgment. These are the kinds of factors I try to tune into, in order to be as objective as possible. Here are a few examples of one aspect that it’s important not to be taken in by. Continue reading “Singers: The difference between Vocalists and Performers”

One of the most psychologically debilitating things any person can encounter is that feeling that they are “not good enough”. In particular, with the social media and news of today making it all too easy to be bombarded with the “best” people in the world at a given skill/job, and people constantly posting about how great they are doing, it’s fairly commonplace to then feel permanently inadequate compared to those people.

When we feel inadequate

For singers who just love to sing out a little, maybe this arises from seeing someone else getting more applause or recognition than you feel you did at the local open mic, karaoke, friends gathered round a piano, singing group or choir, etc, or just feeling like you don’t sound the way “Singer X” does. For artists, this might involve us seeing one person getting signed to a label, a top flight artist filling an arena, another having a successful album launch, while we feel we are still battling even recording a single song we like. And for all of us, when working on our repertoire, we might feel like we’re beating our head off a brick wall getting a song under our belt, whereas someone else seems to be nailing it every single time. Continue reading “Looking to others for vocal inspiration, without holding yourself to their standards”