The Irony of the Dunning-Kruger Effect

maybe you already know this curve it appears in countless youtube videos blog posts about society and the business world and it is the prevalent result when you look at the psychological effect that is commonly associated with the danny kruger effect the curve is the visual equivalent to this quote commonly attributed to charles bukowski the problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts while the stupid ones are full of confidence the curve shows that the people who are the most confident about their knowledge are the ones who have little to no

actual knowledge about the topic thus the speak in the curve is fittingly named mount stupid once you learn more about the topic your confidence plummets since you realize how much there is that you don't know further learning will improve your confidence yet you can never reach the blissful heights of mount stupid again when i initially discovered this graph i was thrilled because it's so accurately describes the way all my learning processes have felt over time i even anticipated the confidence drop behind mount stupid and tried to adjust my level of confidence accordingly but when i

went out to learn more about the dunning-kruger effect i realized that something about the story that i've just told couldn't be right see the problem is that the mont stupid graph resembles the initial bukowski quote in yet another aspect just as the quote is falsely attributed to chad spakowski this curve has nothing to do with the real danny kruger effect and this is where the irony starts to understand what the dunning-kruger effect is actually about it is best to start with the original study that first introduced the effect published in 1999 by justin kruger and

david dunning the question that led kruger and dunning to write their paper was this how is it that people sometimes say things that are clearly wrong and yet are totally confident that they are correct the answer can be found in the concept of metacognition that is the knowledge about your knowledge or the understanding of your own thought processes imagine you have to take a grammar test yet you're unfamiliar with the rules of grammar naturally you don't know which answer is correct but even if you finally pick an answer you cannot determine whether you picked correctly

again because you don't know the rules of grammar in terms of meta cognition this means that both choosing the right answer as well as evaluating whether an answer is correct require the exact same knowledge about the given topic this is one of the core insights of the diane kruger effect described by the authors as the dual burden of unskilled people the effects of this can be seen in the tests kruger and dunning have conducted for their study they gave students tests on the topics of humor grammar and logic and asked the students after the test

how good they thought their performance was to evaluate how much the actual test score differed from the perceived ability of the students they produced this following graph on the x-axis we have the students divided in four groups according to how good they performed in the test the y-axis shows at which percentile a given test score stands in relation to all the other test scores the graph for the actual test scores looks like this the average score of the group with the low scoring students ranks quite low the scores of the highest scoring students rank comparatively

high no big surprises here now comes the interesting part if all the students had perfectly assessed their own performance the graph of their perceived ability would perfectly match the graph of the actual test scores instead it looks like this the students in the lowest scoring quartile grossly overestimated their ability relative to their peers they thought they had scored better than average when in fact their performance fell in the 12th percentile this can be explained by the aforementioned concept of metacognition if you lack the knowledge to answer correctly you also lack the knowledge to correctly assess

your own performance but there is another interesting aspect in this graph while the low scoring students overestimated themselves the best scoring students underestimated their performance kroger and dunning attributed this to the false consensus effect that means the top quartile participants evaluated their own performance correctly but because they performed so adeptly they assumed the same was true of their peers as mentioned before kroger and dunning conducted several tests for this study but the quintessence always remained the same it is noteworthy however that the same phenomenon has since been found by numerous other studies they investigated it

under various circumstances as well as with different methods and provide further empirical proof for the danny kruger effect this study from 2013 for example showed that a danny kruger effect persists even when the test subjects are explicitly told that their self-evaluation is flawed when we now look back at a mod stupid curve it becomes quite obvious that it misrepresents the actual danny kruger fact in multiple ways first the effect is not about stupid people but about incompetence that is the absence of knowledge about a given topic and since all of us are incompetent in one

area or another the danny kruger effect applies to all of us second and contrary to what many internet blogs claim the study doesn't show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than incompetent people if we look back at the graphs from the study there is a clear positive correlation between the actual performance and the perceived ability it is only the magnitude by which the assessment deviates from reality that changes third the danny kruger effect is about the misconceptions of poor performance not the ones of beginners without knowledge it is noteworthy however that in 2018

david dunning and the colleague published a study on this exact topic that is overconfidence among beginners their study in fact provides some empirical proof for their mouth stupid curve yet i'm quite sure that most people who use the curve have never heard of their study [Music] i have tried to trace the origin of the mouth stupid curve but i couldn't find anything conclusive all that i'm left with is the irony in the story the curve and all the people who use it confidently fail to understand a psychological effect that deals with confidently misunderstanding things i

presume it can't get any more absurd than that yet even while writing this i'm fully aware that i myself might have misrepresented the effect or the current knowledge in the field of psychology although i've tried to read as much as possible about the topic i'm certain that i've merely scratched the surface so i guess i have to conclude this video roughly at the same point where i started it that is a point of not knowing although my ignorance might now be a bit more elaborate if you're confident however that i made mistakes in my explanations

please feel free to call me out i promise to respond to every video that's titled the irony of the irony of the dany kruger effect