#dunning

You Could Be Falling for the Dunning-Kruger Effect and Not Even Know It

"One of the most insidious cognitive biases is the famous Dunning-Kruger Effect, which describes the way people who are not good at (or knowledgeable about) something lack the perspective to judge their capabilities in it—that lack of experience and knowledge causes us to overestimate our abilities. In other words, people tend to think they’re good at things they are not actually good at. It makes us a lot more susceptible to what scientists call “bullshit,” and can get us into trouble when we dive into tasks or activities we have zero business diving into."

Bill collector

Personnel gathered on the deck of FURIOUS are ready to rush forward and steady the Sopwith Pup being flown by Cmdr. Dunning on 2 August I9I7. Five days later, his latest landing attempt ended in tragedy when the aircraft slewed to one side on landing and toppled overboard, with its pilot being drowned.

As you can see, the findings reported by Kruger and Dunning are often interpreted to suggest that the less competent people are, the more competent they think they are. People who perform worst at a task tend to think they’re god’s gift to said task, and the people who can actually do said task often display excessive modesty. I suspect we find this sort of explanation compelling because it appeals to our implicit just-world theories: we’d like to believe that people who obnoxiously proclaim their excellence at X, Y, and Z must really not be so very good at X, Y, and Z at all, and must be (over)compensating for some actual deficiency; it’s much less pleasant to imagine that people who go around shoving their (alleged) superiority in our faces might really be better than us at what they do.