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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Tim Chambers (talk | contribs) at 19:33, 10 October 2006 (Jefferson was right.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

To some, the Kruger Dunning effect is more a matter of believe. Looking at the original paper it appears that the estimated quality of ones own performance is almost independent of the actual test performance: all test subjects rated themselves with 55 to 70%. Hence, test performance and the own perception of test performance may not be related at all, since both smart and clueless people responded with the same standard guess.

Or, to put it into a better phrase: All people think that they are smart.  :-)

That's not what the paper actually demonstrated. Much more interesting are the changes in self-evaluation after seeing the work of others and after receiving training. Incompetent people do not change their inflated estimates of themselves even when presented with the work of others, but they do change after receiving training — thus becoming more competent, and more capable of evaluating their previous poor performance. Conversely, highly competent people fall prey to the false consensus effect and underestimate themselves because they assume everyone is as good as they are, barring evidence to the contrary. Training increases both the estimate of their own competence (since they receive confirmation that they were correct) and of their competence with respect to others.

It is true that all (or most) people think they are above average, which is probably just a mechanism for keeping a positive (and hence productive) self-image. What the paper demonstrated was that a large factor in why incompetent people do not recognize their own incompetence is because they cannot competently evaluate their performance. They suck even at knowing that they suck.

If you're bad at something you're also likely to be bad at recognizing that you're bad at it. Obviously this applies much less to tasks where success or failure can be trivially correlated with the results and/or do not require knowledge to establish (your ability in cooking a nice souffle is easily measured by tasting the end result) but many tasks are complicated and/or knowledge-based, and the outcome is not immediately obvious to relate to one's own ability. JRM · Talk 10:38, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

That jibes with my memory of it. However, there is little value to discussing this on the talk page. Why not improve the article itself? Uucp 10:49, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

Another study showed that 80% of all questions related to Misplaced Pages editing can be answered with "because I'm lazy". :-) Actually, I only wrote the above because I'd just read the paper and the remark I replied to seemed inappropriate. You're quite right that the article could use some attention too, however. I don't know whether the "Dunning-Kruger effect" doesn't happen to be exactly what the anon describes, though; I'm not a psychology student. I'll see if I can expand on the description of the paper in the next few days. (I'm off to catch a train, so I have a good excuse this time. :-) JRM · Talk 11:38, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

I found this to be interesting (from ) <>< tbc 19:33, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance realistically, they found.

The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that "he who knows best knows how little he knows."