![]() The original study was focused specifically on competence, as opposed to intelligence - Dunning and Kruger were more concerned with the empirical, measurable factors of how well a person could perform a task (even "simple" or "stupid" tasks) and that person's perception of how they performed that task, rather than the more nebulous concept of comparative " intelligence" or " education." However, the inspiration for the entire study was a desperately under-educated Pittsburgher who possessed badly flawed reasoning skills (see below). This overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. And what about the underachievers who overestimated their performance? In the words of Dunning and Kruger: Those who scored lowest on the test were found to have "grossly overestimated" their scores, thus displaying what became known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is similar to the aforementioned "impostor syndrome" - found notably in graduate students and high-achieving women - whereby high achievers fail to recognize their talents as they think that others must be equally good. This can be explained as a form of psychological projection: those who found the tasks easy (and thus scored highly) mistakenly thought that they would also be easy for others. Those who scored well on these tests were shown, consistently, to underestimate their performance. ![]() The effect has been shown by experiment in several ways, but in this case Dunning and Kruger tested students on a series of criteria such as humour, grammar, and logic, and compared the actual test results with each student's own estimation of their performance. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a slightly more specific case of the bias known as illusory superiority, where people tend to overestimate their good points in comparison to others around them, while concurrently underestimating their negative points. Bertrand Russell, The Triumph of Stupidity ![]() “ ”One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision. The principle is illustrated indirectly by the common saying that "I've learned enough about _ to know what I don't know." The implication is that someone who hasn't learned much about the subject would have no appreciation for how much there is to learn about it, and so might grossly overestimate their level of understanding. The inverse also applies: the unusually competent people tend to underestimate their ability compared to others this is known as impostor syndrome. Nonetheless, there have however been subsequent studies that confirm Dunning and Kruger's original claim. Ī 2023 paper argued that the original work of Dunning and Kruger did not show what they claimed they had shown, but had only shown that people of all competence levels overestimated their competence Dunning and Kruger's research had used a small and narrow sample size of 45 undergraduate students. When people do not recognize their own mental illness, this is known as "anosognosia" this is common for people with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia. In simple words: "people who are too ignorant to know how ignorant they are". ![]() This lack of awareness is attributed to their lower level of competence, which robs them of the ability to critically analyse their performance, leading to a significant overestimation of themselves. The effect occurs where people fail to adequately assess their level of competence - or specifically, their incompetence - at a task and thus consider themselves much more competent than everyone else. The Dunning-Kruger effect (also known as Mount Stupid or Smug Snake ), named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger for their seminal paper of 1999. “ ”To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant
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