Thursday, May 12, 2016

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Straight from Wikipedia:

Dunning–Kruger effect

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is. Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.[1]

The bias was first experimentally observed by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University in 1999. They postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in the unskilled, and external misperception in the skilled: "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]


Ok, I thought the person that showed it to me was joking.... You know, the old trick of posting something on Wikipedia then showing it to someone before it gets defrauded and yanked off. But I looked up the original research from Cornell, AND my friend showed me her copy from 2000. Amazing.....