So all the folks pointing at others while somehow thinking they were exempt from not knowing how ignorant they were, were right? Or were they wrong?
I'm starting to get confused. I do know the true-believer members of the cult of Dunning-Kruger are not going to take this well.
From McGill University's Office of Science and Society:
The darling of those who wish to explain why incompetent people don’t know they’re unskilled, the Dunning-Kruger effect may actually just be a data artefact.
I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma, explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect. “They don’t know,” the opera singer belts out at the climax, “that they don’t know.”
I was planning on writing a very short article about the Dunning-Kruger effect and it felt like shooting fish in a barrel. Here’s the effect, how it was discovered, what it means. End of story.
But as I double-checked the academic literature, doubt started to creep in. While trying to understand the criticism that had been leveled at the original study, I fell down a rabbit hole, spoke to a few statistics-minded people, corresponded with Dr. Dunning himself, and tried to understand if our brain really was biased to overstate our competence in activities at which we suck... or if the celebrated effect was just a mirage brought about by the peculiar way in which we can play with numbers.
Have we been overstating our confidence in the Dunning-Kruger effect?
A misunderstood effectThe most important mistake people make about the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to Dr. Dunning, has to do with who falls victim to it. “The effect is about us, not them,” he wrote to me. “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is not about dumb people. It’s mostly about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at.
In a nutshell, the Dunning-Kruger effect was originally defined as a bias in our thinking. If I am terrible at English grammar and am told to answer a quiz testing my knowledge of English grammar, this bias in my thinking would lead me, according to the theory, to believe I would get a higher score than I actually would. And if I excel at English grammar, the effect dictates I would be likely to slightly underestimate how well I would do. I might predict I would get a 70% score while my actual score would be 90%. But if my actual score was 15% (because I’m terrible at grammar), I might think more highly of myself and predict a score of 60%. This discrepancy is the effect, and it is thought to be due to a specific problem with our brain’s ability to assess its skills.
This is what student participants went through for Dunning and Kruger’s research project in the late 1990s. There were assessments of grammar, of humour, and of logical reasoning. Everyone was asked how well they thought they did and everyone was also graded objectively, and the two were compared.
Since then, many studies have been done that have reported this effect in other domains of knowledge. Dr. Dunning tells me he believes the effect “has more to do with being misinformed rather than uninformed.” If I am asked the boiling point of mercury, it is clear my brain does not hold the answer. But if I am asked what is the capital of Scotland, I may think I know enough to say Glasgow, but it turns out it’s Edinburgh. That’s misinformation and it’s pushing down on that confidence button in my brain.
So case closed, right? On the contrary. In 2016 and 2017, two papers were published in a mathematics journal called Numeracy. In them, the authors argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect was a mirage. And I tend to agree.
The effect is in the noise....
....MUCH MORE
