The Dunning-Kruger Effect is when someone is so ignorant they lack the ability to realize just how ignorant they are, leading to a sort of delicious paradox.
Have you ever wondered why some people come to erroneous conclusions despite all the counter evidence, overestimate their abilities, and constantly make mistakes whereas other, more intelligent people often claim ignorance and throw things on the “too hard” pile?
I mean, the reality is that 49.99% of people must be below average at any given time at any given skill. Yet, studies have shown that 90% of Swedish drivers believe they are above average, which is absurd. Most people believe they are above average in physical appearance. Most people believe they are above average when it comes to intelligence. How do we explain this?
In psychology, there is a term for this particular type of cognitive bias and it makes for an excellent mental model and it is called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the perverse situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, 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.”
In other words, the incompetent person is literally so incompetent that he doesn’t realize just how incompetent he is because he lacks the capacity to process that information.
Lack of Access to Performance Standards Data, or Ranking Systems, Explain Some of the Reason the Dunning-Kruger Effect Exists
Dunning and Kruger argued that the reason people feel this way is that many people don’t have access to performance standards data. In other words, they don’t have a way to rank themselves against other drivers, or professors, or chefs.
Personally, I think this mental model could be exasperated by the “birds of a feather” nature of human relationships which causes people to be attracted socially, romantically, and professionally to those who are similar. This could lead to an echo-chamber feedback that may explain things like a group of racists believing they are intellectually superior to other races despite the fact they would fail standardized tests and read at the equivalent of a third grade level. Since they are only surrounded by others who are of comparable, limited ability, they don’t realize just how bad off they are relative to everyone else. They literally lack the data and framework to come to this realization.
The Test for the Dunning-Kruger Effect
Kruger and Dunning believed that for any given skill, incompetent people will do four things: (more…)
