Comment from Psychologist Daniel Hoadley
Board-certified clinical psychologist Dr. Krista Jordan tells Bored Panda that if someone is acting like a know-it-all, they're probably trying to cover up their insecurities.
"People who are secure in themselves don't need to flaunt their knowledge and would not risk alienating people or hurting their feelings by bragging. People who need to act as though they know everything are just trying to soothe their deeply deficient self-esteem," she explains.
Also, humans as a whole have a tendency to overestimate their knowledge, which makes them think that they know more than they actually do. Even though we often lack the full information, we still believe we have enough for decision-making. This cognitive bias is called the Illusion of Information Adequacy.
Combined with naïve realism, a psychological bias that makes individuals think that their beliefs are objective and reasonable, it drives people to assume that anyone who disagrees with them is wrong despite their failure to consider what they might be missing.
Then there's a Dunning-Kruger effect, which deceives people into thinking they're an expert in everything. An issue with this is that individuals experiencing this cognitive bias feel the need to impose their ideas, as absolute truths, making others look incompetent or ignorant.
As you can imagine, being in the presence of a person who tries to put down others with their false sense of knowledge can be annoying, so we asked for some advice from Dr. Jordan on how to deal with them, online and in real life.
"The best way to handle a know-it-all, whether online or in real life, is to model having good self-esteem," she says. "Which means being humble. For instance, if a know-it-all is saying the earth is flat, you can just say, 'Well, that's interesting, I realize people have different opinions about that. My personal opinion is that it's round, but I know not everyone agrees with that,'" Dr. Jordan suggests.
"That will accomplish a number of things," she further explained, "including 1) avoiding a confrontation, because you stated that you don't expect everyone to agree with you, 2) showing the person who thinks they know everything what a mature and self-confident response looks like and 3) does not debase you in any way because you never asserted that the know-it-all was correct."
