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The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which "...people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average. This leads to a perverse result where people with less competence will rate their ability more highly than people with relatively more competence.

Hypotheses

The phenomenon was demonstrated in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Their results were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999.

Kruger and Dunning noted a number of previous studies which tend to suggest that in skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis, "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (as Charles Darwin put it). They hypothesized that with a typical skill which humans may possess in greater or lesser degree,

1. Incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill.
2. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others.
3. Incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy.
4. If they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

The authors draw an analogy with anosognosia - a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability due to brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of the disability. This may include unawareness of quite dramatic impairments, such as blindness or paralysis.

Studies

They set out to test these hypotheses on human subjects consisting of Cornell undergraduates who were registered in various psychology courses. In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning examined self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank, whereupon the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated their own rank. As Dunning and Kruger noted,

Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.

Meanwhile, people with true knowledge tended to underestimate their competence. A follow-up study suggests that grossly incompetent students improve both their skill level and their ability to estimate their class rank only after extensive tutoring in the skills they had previously lacked.

They won Ig Nobel Prizes in Psychology in 2000 with their report Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.

In 2003 Dunning and Joyce Ehrlinger, also of Cornell University, published a study that detailed a shift in people's views of themselves influenced by external cues. Participants in the study (Cornell University undergraduates) were given tests of their knowledge of geography, some intended to positively affect their self-views, some intended to affect them negatively. They were then asked to rate their performance, and those given the positive tests reported significantly better performance than those given the negative.

Daniel Ames and Lara Kammrath extended this work to sensitivity to others, and the subjects' perception of how sensitive they were. Work by Burson Larrick and Joshua Klayman has suggested that the effect is not so obvious and may be due to noise and bias levels.

Dunning, Kruger, and coauthors' latest paper on this subject comes to qualitatively similar conclusions after making some attempt to test alternative explanations.

See also

• Anosognosia
• Crank
• Depressive realism
• Downing effect
• Lake Wobegon effect
• Self-efficacy
• Self-serving bias
• Opposite of Impostor syndrome

References

1. ^ Kruger, Justin (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77 (6): 1121–34. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
2. Dunning, David (2003). "Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 12 (3): 83–87. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01235. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
3. Charles Darwin (1871), The Descent of Man (w), pp. Introduction, page 4, retrieved 2008-07-18
4. Joyce Ehrlinger (2003). "How Chronic Self-Views Influence (and Potentially Mislead) Estimates of Performance". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 84 (1). American Psychological Association: 5–17. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.1.5. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
5. Daniel R. Ames (2004). "Mind-Reading and Metacognition: Narcissism, not Actual Competence, Predicts Self-Estimated Ability". Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. 28 (3). Springer Netherlands: 187–209. doi:10.1023/B:JONB.0000039649.20015.0e. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
6. Katherine A. Burson (2006). "Skilled or Unskilled, but Still Unaware of It: How Perceptions of Difficulty Drive Miscalibration in Relative Comparisons" (PDF). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 90 (1): 60–77. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.90.1.60. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
7. "Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent", http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~ehrlinger/Self_&_Social_Judgment/Ehrlinger_et_al_2008.pdf

• Social sciences methodology
• Social psychology