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 related to self-assessment of ability.
- 3Low-ability individuals often suffer from illusory superiority in their skills.
- 4High-ability individuals may mistakenly assume their skills are commonplace.
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
modern psychological parallel to hubris
This cognitive bias describes a phenomenon where individuals with low ability overestimate their competence, mirroring the psychological mechanism of hubris.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where individuals with limited competence in a specific domain tend to overestimate their own abilities. This phenomenon occurs because the same lack of skill that prevents them from performing well also prevents them from recognizing their own incompetence.
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 Conversely, the effect can also manifest as high performers underestimating their relative skill, assuming that tasks easy for them are also easy for others. Formalized by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999, the concept is frequently misunderstood in popular culture as a general claim about intelligence rather than a specific bias regarding task-based proficiency.