Dunning–Kruger effect

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitiveinability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.^[1]

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."^[1]

Original studyEdit

The psychological phenomenon of illusory superiority was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".^[1] The identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks with his face covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras. This belief was based on his misunderstanding the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink.^[2]

Other investigations of the phenomenon, such as "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003), indicate that much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person's ignorance of a given activity's standards of performance. The pattern of overestimation of competence appeared in studies of reading comprehension, of the practice of medicine, of motor-vehicle operation, and of the playing of games such as chess and tennis.^[3] Dunning and Kruger's research also indicates that training in a task, such as solving a logic puzzle, increases people's ability to accurately evaluate how good they are at it.^[4]

In Self-insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (2005), Dunning described the Dunning–Kruger effect as "the anosognosia of everyday life", referring to the condition in which a disabled person either denies or seems unaware of his or her disability. He stated: "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."^[5]^[6]

Popular recognitionEdit

In 2000, Kruger and Dunning were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize, in satirical recognition of the scientific work recorded in "their modest report", "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments", about the cognitive bias of competence by way of illusory superiority.^[7]

Sequel studiesEdit

Dunning and Kruger tested the hypotheses of the cognitive bias of illusory superiority on undergraduate students of introductory courses in psychology, by examining the students' self-assessments of their intellectual skills in logical reasoning (inductive, deductive, abductive), English grammar, and personal sense of humor. After learning their self-assessment scores, the students were asked to estimate their ranks in the psychology class. The group of competent students underestimated their class ranks, while the group of incompetent students overestimated their ranks; yet the incompetent group did not estimate their class ranks as higher than the ranks estimated by the competent group. Across four studies, the research indicated that the study participants who scored in the bottom quartile on tests of their sense of humor, knowledge of grammar, and logical reasoning overestimated their test performance and their abilities; despite test scores that placed them in the 12th percentile, the participants estimated they ranked in the 62nd percentile.^[1]^[8]

Moreover, competent students tended to underestimate their own competence, because they erroneously presumed that tasks easy for them to perform were also easy for other people to perform. Incompetent students improved their ability to correctly estimate their class rank after receiving minimal tutoring in the skills they previously lacked, regardless of any objective improvement gained in said skills of perception.^[1] The study Mind-Reading and Metacognition: Narcissism, not Actual Competence, Predicts Self-estimated Ability (2004) extended the cognitive-bias premise of illusory superiority to test the subjects' emotional sensitivity toward other people and their perceptions of other people.^[9]

The study How Chronic Self-Views Influence (and Potentially Mislead) Estimates of Performance (2003) indicated a shift in the participants' view of themselves when influenced by external cues. The participants' knowledge of geography was tested; some tests were intended to positively affect the participant's self-view and some were intended to affect it negatively. The participants then were asked to rate their performances; the participants given tests with a positive intent reported better performance than did the participants given tests with a negative intent.^[10]

To test Dunning and Kruger’s hypotheses, "that people, at all performance levels, are equally poor at estimating their relative performance", the study Skilled or Unskilled, but Still Unaware of It: How Perceptions of Difficulty Drive Miscalibration in Relative Comparisons (2006) investigated three studies that manipulated the "perceived difficulty of the tasks, and, hence, [the] participants' beliefs about their relative standing". The investigation indicated that when the experimental subjects were presented with moderately difficult tasks, there was little variation among the best performers and the worst performers in their ability to accurately predict their performance. With more difficult tasks, the best performers were less accurate in predicting their performance than were the worst performers. Therefore, judges at all levels of skill are subject to similar degrees of error in the performance of tasks.^[11]

In testing alternative explanations for the cognitive bias of illusory superiority, the study Why the Unskilled are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-insight Among the Incompetent (2008) reached the same conclusions as previous studies of the Dunning–Kruger effect: that, in contrast to high performers, "poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve".^[12]

Cultural differences in self-perceptionEdit

Studies of the Dunning–Kruger effect usually have been of North Americans, but studies of Japanese people suggest that cultural forces have a role in the occurrence of the effect.^[13] The study Divergent Consequences of Success and Failure in Japan and North America: An Investigation of Self-improving Motivations and Malleable Selves (2001) indicated that Japanese people tended to underestimate their abilities, and tended to see underachievement (failure) as an opportunity to improve their abilities at a given task, thereby increasing their value to the social group.^[14]

Historical antecedentsEdit

Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was formulated in 1999, the cognitive bias that is illusory superiority has been known throughout history and identified by intellectuals, such as:

the philosopher Confucius (551–479 BC), who said, "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance"^[3]
the philosopher Socrates (470–399 BC), who interpreted a prophecy from the Delphic oracle that he was wise despite feeling that he did not fully understand anything, as the wisdom of being aware that he knew nothing
the playwright William Shakespeare (1564–1616), who said, "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool" (As You Like It, V. i.)^[15]
the naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882), who said, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"^[1]
the poet W. B. Yeats (1865–1939), who, in the poem "The Second Coming", said: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."^[12]
the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who said, "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."^[12]

ReferencesEdit

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association. 77 (6): 1121–1134. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.64.2655 . doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367.
^ "Why losers have delusions of grandeur". New York Post. 23 May 2010. Retrieved 19 March 2014.
^ ^a ^b Dunning, David; Johnson, Kerri; Ehrlinger, Joyce; Kruger, Justin (1 June 2003). "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 12 (3): 83–87. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01235.
^ Lee, Chris (5 November 2016). "Revisiting why incompetents think they're awesome". Ars Technica. p. 3. Retrieved 11 January2014.
^ Morris, Errol (20 June 2010). "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)". New York Times. Retrieved 7 March 2011.
^ Dunning, David (2005). Self-insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself. New York: Psychology Press. pp. 14–15. ISBN 1841690740. OCLC 56066405.
^ "Ig Nobel Past Winners". Improbable Research. Retrieved 7 March 2011.
^ Yarkoni, Tal (7 July 2010). "What the Dunning-Kruger effect Is and Isn't". Retrieved 28 July 2017.
^ Ames, Daniel R.; Kammrath, Lara K. (September 2004). "Mind-Reading and Metacognition: Narcissism, not Actual Competence, Predicts Self-Estimated Ability" (PDF). Journal of Nonverbal Behavior. 28 (3): 187–209. doi:10.1023/b:jonb.0000039649.20015.0e. ISSN 0191-5886.
^ Ehrlinger, Joyce; Dunning, David (January 2003). "How chronic self-views influence (and potentially mislead) estimates of performance". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association. 84 (1): 5–17. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.1.5. PMID 12518967.
^ Burson, Katherine A.; Larrick, Richard P.; Klayman, Joshua (2006). "Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association. 90 (1): 60–77. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.90.1.60. hdl:2027.42/39168. PMID 16448310.
^ ^a ^b ^c Ehrlinger, Joyce; Johnson, Kerri; Banner, Matthew; Dunning, David; Kruger, Justin (2008). "Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent". Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 105 (1): 98–121. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2007.05.002. PMC 2702783 . PMID 19568317.
^ DeAngelis, Tori (February 2003). "Why We overestimate Our Competence". Monitor on Psychology. American Psychological Association. 34 (2): 60. ISSN 1529-4978. Retrieved 7 March 2011.
^ Heine, S. J.; Lehman, D. R.; Ide, E.; Leung, C.; Kitayama, S.; Takata, T.; Matsumoto, H. (October 2001). "Divergent Consequences of Success and Failure in Japan and North America: An Investigation of Self-improving Motivations and Malleable Selves". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. American Psychological Association. 81 (4): 599–615. ISSN 0022-3514. PMID 11642348.
^ Fuller, Geraint (2011). "Ignorant of ignorance?". Practical Neurology. 11 (6): 365–365. doi:10.1136/practneurol-2011-000117. ISSN 1474-7758. PMID 22100949.

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