You might have heard or seen people call out the Dunning-Kruger effect. It sounds fancy, psychology-ey, and probably something you’ve heard name dropped in conversation and had to nod your head making a show of understanding but in reality have no idea on God’s green earth what they’re talking about…or maybe that’s only happened to me before. It’s one of the more well-known findings of psychology and it’s been the subject of thousands and thousands of citations. And for good reason. The Dunning-Kruger effect is fairly simple, recognizable in the world, and holds up surprisingly well in research—you can find this effect all over the place. You may now see why it’s a pretty easy go-to for looking smart in front of the Jones’ at your next dinner party. But let’s get a few things straight about the Dunning-Kruger effect and why it’s more than just a way to look and be people-smart. Know the Dunning-Kruger effect, and you’re on your way to rising above one of the most pervasive (and depending on who you are, frustrating) parts of human psychology: incompetency. Because at the end of the day, the Dunning-Kruger effect is all about knowing what you don’t know.
The Dunning-Kruger effect refers to the failure of incompetent people to recognize their own incompetence. That sounds a little harsh I know, but when I use the term “incompetent” here, I mean it in a very base, simple sense of the word—being an amateur, not good at something, literally not being competent, you get the idea. We all have things we’re not good at or, speaking for myself, are straight up bad at (one example for me, that’s fluid dynamics; if I never have to go through that part of the physics curriculum again I will be a happy psychologist). That’s not the interesting part though. What is is how we think about the things we’re not good at. This is what we call metacognition—how we think about how we think! Quiet often, people who know the least about something think they’re the ones who know the most. It’s difficult to assess personal expertise in something when knowing so little so people end up overestimating their competency. You can think of the Dunning-Kruger effect as a sort of overconfident, self-bias—that people tend to be pretty overconfident about stuff they actually know quite little about. This effect kind of makes sense in a roundabout kind of way. You need to have competency in a given area in order to accurately assess how competent you are in it. I, for one, know next to nothing about mountain climbing, but that also means I’m an awful person to evaluate exactly how bad I am at it. Paradoxically, the extreme opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect is Imposter Syndrome; this is where people who know a lot about a given subject think they know far less than they really do! In this sense, in knowing so much about something that also means these people have the cognitive skills to recognize the swaths of things they don’t know about (hence the “imposter” feeling part). Confucius and Socrates were both pretty on point in talking about “knowing what you do not know” and all of that. And you can find this kind of self-knowledge discrepancy all over the place.
And this is where the rubber meets the road, because the Dunning-Kruger Effect is pervasive and can have impact in important places. A quintessential example is science knowledge: the least scientifically knowledgeable people tend to think they are far more knowledgeable than they really are. You can find it from knowledge about genetically modified (GM) foods (Fernbach et al., 2019) to vaccinations (Motta, Callagna, & Sylvester, 2018). But this knowledge gap, this overconfidence in one’s own knowledge, translates quite strongly to attitudes and beliefs that oppose the consensus of scientists. For example, the people who know the least about GM foods, think they know the most and are the most opposed to the scientific consensus of GM foods (namely, that they’re perfectly safe to eat; Fernbach et al., 2019). Similarly, the people who know the least about vaccinations and their connection to autism are more likely to think they know more than doctors and scientists and are more likely to oppose vaccination policies and overstate the authority of non-experts (like celebrities; Motta et al., 2018). You can see this trend with racism too; the people who think they are the least racist tend to be the most racist. And, surprise, you also find a similar trend with sexism (West & Eaton, 2019). In other words, what people think they know is very important to how they form opinions and attitudes about real world things—things that they may objectively know quite little about.
Knowing about the Dunning-Kruger effect can help you contextualize how other people think about the world and might also help you keep tabs on yourself too. It kind of makes sense that you would need to know that you’re incompetent in something to then go about becoming competent in it; that’s the basis of self-improvement! But remember, we’re not talking purely about whether you’re competent or not at something. The Dunning-Kruger effect is about the mental toolbox that allows you to appropriately recognize your own competency at a given thing. So in conclusion, that means two things: 1) you need to work hard if you want to recognize and attend to that self-bias. And 2) take a deep breath and keep your cool, because you’ll run into this in the world all the bloody time. But hey, we’re all in this together right?
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Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134. DOI: 10.1037//0022-3514.77.6.1121
Fernbach, P. M., Light, N., Scott, S. E., Inbar, Y., & Rozin, P. (2019). Extreme Opponents of genetically modified foods know the least but think they know the most. Nature Human Behavior, n.p. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3
Motta, M., Callaghan, T., Sylvester, S. (2018). Knowing less but presuming more: Dunning-Kruger effects and the endorsement of anti-vaccine policy attitudes. Social Science and Medicine, 211, 274-281. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2018.06.032
Pennycook, G., Ross, R. M., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2017). Dunning-Kruger effects in reasoning: Theoretical implications of the failure to recognize incompetence. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24, 1774-1784. DOI: 10.3758/s13423-017-1242-7
West, K., & Eaton, A. A. (2019). Prejudiced and unaware of it: Evidence for the Dunning-Kruger model in the domains of racism and sexism. Personality and Individual Differences, 146, 111-119. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2019.03.047
