Next time you’re at a family gathering or a work event, wander around and ask each person you meet this question: “Are you a good driver?”

I’d bet the overwhelming majority of the people you ask would consider themselves a good driver – better than average, certainly.  A survey by Hartford Financial Services found that 88% of respondents considered themselves cautious drivers.  Another study found 80% of respondents rated themselves “above average” as drivers.

Despite this, there are approximately 10 million car crashes every year in the US alone.  That’s about 27,000 per day, or about 19 crashes every single minute of the day, every single day. Yikes. In these, about 35,000 people are killed every year.  That’s just under a hundred people a day, killed in car crashes.  Another 6,500 people are seriously injured in crashes each day.

So, if the overwhelming majority of road users are better than average, why are so many crashes still happening?

Part of the answer is likely due to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is a cognitive theory which hypothesizes that incompetent people lack the self-awareness to identify their own incompetence.

Think about “American Idol” or similar talent search shows.  Inevitably, there are contestants each year who are pushed through the show, not because they have incredible talent, but seemingly for just the opposite condition. These people are pushed through for the laugh value in ratings, but they actually do think they can really sing.  What the Dunning-Kruger Effect suggests is that these individuals are so incompetent that they lack the proper frame of reference with which to judge their own skill level, and therefore they invariably over-estimate their talent.

Surely, incompetency is not strictly relegated to singing on a national talent show.  Spend more than an hour in traffic, and you’re likely to see several people demonstrate their incompetence behind the wheel.  Yet, if our personal assessments of ourselves were true and accurate, seeing a below average driver display their limited skills would be relatively rare.  Instead, we can find them everywhere, at least here in Pennsylvania.

Admittedly, we do little in the Commonwealth to address incompetent driving.  Professional driver education remains optional for residents.  This means it can be a pricey choice that is out of reach for many families, and others can simply opt out.  Most people are taught to drive by their parents, who themselves have not been evaluated as drivers in decades. Even if the parents had taken driver education, the amount and quality of the information that may remain in their minds from a course taken decades earlier will have depreciated over that time – that is, the parent may only decently remember half of what they originally learned.  Years later, when the child is now the parent, they pass along only half of what they remember, which is 25% of what the parent originally learned.

Yet, these people pass the driver’s test (which is exceedingly simple) and are never again evaluated.  And more than 80% of them consider themselves “above average” drivers.  Logic tells us they can’t all be right.

Interestingly, the Dunning-Kruger Effect also tells us that, given the proper metacognition tools, these same people are able to better assess their own skill level.  In other words, a professional assessment could help someone realize their driving kung-fu is not as strong as they believed.  And that becomes the perfect place to start.