The Dunning-Kruger effect can be paraphrased in this way: “On any particular topic, people who are not experts lack the very expertise they need in order to know just how much expertise they lack.” Corey S. Powell interviews David Dunning on how the underlying idea has been developed since the original paper published in 2000 (“David Dunning: Overcoming Overconfidence,” Open Mind, April 5, 2024).
For those who have only seen “Dunning-Krueger effect” deployed as an insult, it’s perhaps useful to briefly review the original paper from 25 years ago: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (77:6, 1121-34). The paper opens with a lovely opening anecdote:
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken .from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o’clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996). …
We argue that when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to
achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine. … [A]s Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted over a century ago, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” (p. 3).
The actual study involved surveys of dozens of Cornell undergraduates. From the abstract:
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
Obvious questions arise. Do the results from these tests and from college undergraduates generalize to other settings and populations? This is where Powell’s interview with Dunning comes in. Dunning describes how he sees the main insight in this way:
The Dunning-Kruger result is a little complicated because it’s actually many results. The one that is a meme is this idea: On any particular topic, people who are not experts lack the very expertise they need in order to know just how much expertise they lack. The Dunning-Kruger effect visits all of us sooner or later in our pockets of incompetence. They’re invisible to us because to know that you don’t know something, you need to know something. It’s not about general stupidity. It’s about each and every one of us, sooner or later.
You can be incredibly intelligent in one area and completely not have expertise in another area. We all know very smart people who don’t recognize deficits in their sense of humor or their social skills, or people who know a lot about art but may not know much about medicine. We each have an array of expertise, and we each have an array of places we shouldn’t be stepping into, thinking we know just as much as the experts. My philosopher friend and I call that “epistemic trespassing,” because you’re trespassing into the area of an expert. We saw this a lot during the pandemic. … I think it was Vernon Law, the baseball pitcher, who said that life is the cruelest teacher because it gives you the test before it provides the lesson.
Is the Dunning-Kruger effect just a statistical artifact?
The critique is that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a statistical artifact known as regression to the mean. People who are poor performers on a test can only overestimate themselves. Those who are high performers can only underestimate themselves, so it’s a measurement error, an artifact. We talk about that issue in the original article. We did a nine-study series investigating regression to the mean. Other people have done studies that call the artifact into question. The critique tends to focus on the first two studies of a four-study paper in 1999. I can’t dismiss the irony of people not taking into account the 25 years of research that have happened since.
Dunning discusses social norms like “do not insult other people” and, at least as a first approximation, “if someone tells us something, we’ve been taught to assume it’s true.” These rules function fairly well in person-to-person interactions, but not on social media.
think what’s interesting about the internet and social media is that it takes us out of the setting where we learned all these politeness rules. Right here, you and I are having a conversation. We’re in a relationship. Twitter is not that. On Twitter, I proclaim something by posting, and you come along a few hours later and you proclaim. We’re not interacting, we’re proclaiming asynchronously. The kindness rules and the politeness rules are not in play.
My anthropologist friends remind me that every time a new communication technology comes around, such as the telegraph or telephone, there is a breakdown in social norms. Whatever politeness rules have been built up don’t yet apply to the new platform. We’re in the middle of that right now. I think what’s happening with social media is that we haven’t developed the politeness rules that we have for face-to-face interaction.
