📖Why People Fail To Recognize Their Own Incompetence

authors
David Dunning and Kerri Johnson and Joyce Ehrlinger and Justin Kruger
year
2003
url
https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8721.01235

  • Fig. 2

    • top performers seem to gave quite accurate estimate in absolute score (≈1 point less than real, out of 45 points)

  • skills to recognize own incompetence are the same skills required to be competent

  • Kruger & Dunning, 1999, Study 4

    • students were given test

    • then half of students received a mini-lecture on how to solve this kind of problem

    • then they were given their original test to look over

    • participants who received the mini-lecture provided more accurate ratings and even lowered their confidence in their logical reasoning ability

    • (but that is after-the-fact assessment of previous performance)

  • top performers accurately assess themselves in absolute terms, but overestimate others

    • “one can disabuse top performers by showing them the responses of other people”

  • people’s estimate comes top-down from their preexisting belief of their skill at that particular area

    • when people were given test in abstract reasoning ability they overestimated themselves, but when taking a computer programming skills test they underestimated themselves. But that was actually the same test. (Ehrlinger & Dunning, 2003, How chronic self-views influence (and potentially mislead) estimates of performance)

      • (Q: did they estimate themselves before or after taking the test?)