Dunning-Kruger Effect

Notes

• It was identified by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in a 1999 study.
  • This identification derived from the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed two banks while his face was covered with lemon juice because he thought that the juice would make it invisible.
• Is a cognitive bias hypothesis in which people with low ability at a given task overestimate their ability at that task.
  • Comes from people's inability to recognize their lack of ability and poor self-awareness.
  • Comes from people's ignorance of a given activity's standards of performance.
  • If you don't have the competency, you can't know you don't have competency in a task. The skills you need to produce the right response about your competency are the same skills you need to know what a right response is.
• Deficits in skill and expertise create a two-prolonged problem.
  1. People perform poorly in the domain in which they're incompetent.
  2. The incompetence makes them unable to recognize their mistakes.

References

• Dunning-Kruger Effect 101
• Dunning–Kruger effect
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect