Is life experience really the best teacher? CogitoErgoDwyer explains.
wherein, relevant to this discussion, one with low ability on a task or little knowledge in an area overestimates their abilities or knowledge in that area; see Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Furthermore, experience is often found to be unrelated to the accuracy of expert judgments and is sometimes negatively correlated with accuracy .
This may be a result of overconfidence or simply a result of large amounts of experience in doing something wrong .one of my first posts on this blog , where I wrote about a study that a colleague and I conducted with a group of mature students taking a critical thinking module . Though they achieved significantly higher gains in critical thinking in comparison to more"traditional" students , their critical thinking ability scores were significantly lower than those of traditional students at baseline ; thus debunking, to some extent, the concept of"life" experience being a driving force, in this respect. Another problem with relying on experience is its personalised nature. For example, it can be argued that all it really amounts to is anecdotal evidence. Simply, an anecdote is a story; and though anecdotes can be a very powerful tool of, anecdotal evidence is a weak source for an argument as it is not necessarily reliable. Using personal experience or anecdotal evidence to draw a conclusion or solve a problem is further problematic because, essentially, it’s based on a sample size of one; and so, we cannot generalise one person’s experience to the population at large . For example, in exploring a given topic, event or situation, other people may have had very different experiences; so, then, the question becomes"which anecdote or experience is correct?" . In a way, drawing conclusions in this manner is akin to makingMoreover, another big problem with personal experience is that it is, at its foundation, biased. Remember, this is the perspective of one person — one person, with their own beliefs, attitudes, values, passions and desires. The manner in which an individual draws on their personal experience, in light of these other factors, is inherently biased. Similarly, it can be argued that the use of personal experience in our, which is essentially a cognitive error in which we take what we perceive, believe or have encountered as fact or as how such events play out a significant amount of the time. On a larger scale, it can be argued that every bias is an experience bias in the sense that biases are developedexperience; however, the distinction here is that the nature of experience, in general, is the erroneous source of belief as fact. In conclusion, people have a tendency to put great value into the notion of experience. Indeed, experience is what allows us to learn, given that learningan experience; and so, to look back on an experience, we can retrieve the information we learned — a very useful process, indeed! However, we must also acknowledge that experience is not the same as expertise; we cannot generalise our personal experiences to the larger population; and our experiences may not always provide us accurate information. The point is, though experience can indeed be useful, we must not rely on it for every issue we engage because it may not be good enough — be it with respect to sufficient knowledge or objectivity. If we want to develop our experience in a manner that facilitates expertise, we must do so in light of evidence, humility and