David Dunning mentions some of these and the problem with them in this recent article on MSN: What is the Dunning-Kruger effect? And Dunning does have a paper about the overconfidence of beginners, with a graph with a very slightly resemblance to the Not a Dunning-Kruger graph, but since it’s not showing the Dunning-Kruger effect and that paper doesn’t have Kruger as an author, it should really be a Dunning-Sanchez graph.Īnd of course there’s the same problem one encounters with any finding of this kind. They are close enough though, at least in spirit, to help make DKE as popular as it is, in both real and warped variations. It is not the similar thing where the relationship between knowledge in a field and willingness to defend strong opinions about the field is weirdly non-linear.This sometimes uses the same, pulled-from-the-anus graph. It is not that thing where you start studying a subject, think you’ve got it all figured out after the first two semesters, and realize just how little you know halfway through the third.Which hasn’t prevented even Bloggers at Psychology Today to peddle the oft seen “alternative” DKE graph that is always just made up in MS paint, like mine. It is not “ amateurs think they are smarter than the experts” – DKE says the unskilled overestimate their skill on average, but only in a small minority of studies does the estimate from the bottom quartile put them in the top quartile.It is not “ unintelligent people think they are smart” – As described, DKE applies to anyone with low skill in a domain, even if they are capable in others, as when physicists turn into Armchair epidemiologists.Here are a few things DKE is not, even if people say it is: Not a Dunning-Kruger graph, no matter what the internet tells you. It just fits so neatly with our own personal observations, doesn’t it? Everyone encounters overconfident people in their life, and it feels good to put them down with a reference to SCIENCE! So DKE has become a very popular and often misused and misunderstood concept. Just for some domains, mind you, as they state in the paper:īut if you ask someone today what causes someone to overestimate their skill in a field, it’s likely the thing they have heard of is the Dunning-Kruger effect (DKE). Their hypothesized explanation was that for certain domains, the skill required for self-assessment is also required to succeed, leading those who lack to skill to be “ Unskilled and unaware of it” (the title of their paper). Their results showed that on average the students overestimated themselves and that this was chiefly due to the self-assessments of the lowest scoring quartile, while the highest scoring quartile slightly underestimated their own performance. Self assessed ability to recognize humor, based on Kruger and Dunning, 1999, figure 1. Kruger and Dunning did four studies, one on recognizing humor, two on solving logic puzzles and one on knowing grammar, where they compared the results volunteer psychology students got on a test in the domain, with the same student’s self assessments related to the test. And even if you have read it you likely need a very quick refresher. If you’ve never been curious about where the term comes from, you have presumably also never read the 1999 paper by social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning that first described the effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a mess The original paper After reading more social psychology and education science papers than I care to ever do again, I’ve come to a few conclusions that I’d like to share with you all. They are very popular though, so I thought I should look into the claim, which sent me down a rabbit hole or a complete rabbit warren. The post came from the QI Elves who delight in posting quirky and unexpected scientific trivia, but rarely include sources and occasionally get fooled by “press release”-science. New evidence suggests that the Dunning-Kruger effect doesn’t exist – people who don’t know what they’re talking about are aware of that fact. A couple of weeks ago a statement popped up in my Facebook feed that surprised me.
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