Dunning–Kruger effect
Also known as: D-K effect
- 1The effect was formalized by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999.
- 2It describes a cognitive bias regarding self-assessment of ability.
- 3Low-ability individuals often provide overly positive assessments of their skills.
- 4High-performing individuals may conversely underestimate their skills.
- 5The effect is specific to unskilled areas rather than general intelligence.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of their ability.
Connections1
psychological modern equivalent of hubris
This cognitive bias describes a modern psychological phenomenon where individuals with low ability overestimate their competence, mirroring the dangerous overconfidence inherent in hubris.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that explains why individuals with limited competence in a specific domain often overestimate their own abilities. This systematic error in self-assessment leads to an inflated sense of performance that does not align with objective reality.
Relation between average self-perceived performance and average actual performance on a college exam. [ 1 ] The red area shows the tendency of low performers to overestimate their abilities. Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.Wikimedia Commons: File:Dunning–Kruger_Effect2.svgPerformance at an exam with 45 questions, measured first in relation to the peer group (top) and then in relation to the number of questions answered correctly (bottom). The diagram shows the average performance of the groups corresponding to each quartile. [ 16 ]Wikimedia Commons: File:Dunning-kruger_effect_-_percentile.svgSimulated data of the relation between subjective (self-assessed) and objective IQ. The upper diagram shows the individual data points and the lower one shows the averages of the different IQ groups. This simulation is based only on the statistical effect known as the regression toward the mean together with the bette...Wikimedia Commons: File:Dunning-kruger_effect_-_simulation1.svg Formalized by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999, the research also notes that high performers may conversely underestimate their own skills. In popular discourse, the effect is frequently misunderstood as a general claim about low intelligence, rather than a specific bias regarding unskilled performance in particular areas.