What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn't

http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt

by gruseom • 16 years ago

62 23 16 years ago

jgg4• 16 years ago

My favorite part of the Dunning-Kruger effect are the people who used to talk about how smart they are, but upon learning of the study run around saying they're dumb because they think that puts them on par with the intelligent.

presidentender• 16 years ago

A foolish man thinks himself wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. Upon learning this, the fool spouts his foolishness for all to see; the wise man remains as he was.

zazi• 16 years ago

Comment by David Dunning (if he is actually him) on the blog post - "The blog author is correct in describing what the original effect is poor performers are overly confident relative to their actual performance. They are not more confident than high performers"

It seems that really smart/intelligent people actually have a much higher estimation of their ability then the less intelligent people (just that the discrepancy between their actual ability and the estimated ability are smaller than less smart people). So opp to what jgg mentioned, those who learn of this study should be inflating their estimation of their own intelligence to put themselves up there with the smartest quartile.

Those who run around saying they are dumb are actually.... dumb =)

damoncali• 16 years ago

So the net of all this is that smart people think they're smart and dumb people think they're dumb. But smart people underestimate their smartness and dumb people underestimate their dumbness. Academia at it's finest. I feel dumb.

borism• 16 years ago

that makes me wonder whether your comment is made to look you smarter or dumber than you are, and what that means in Dunning-Kruger effect's context.

jgg4• 16 years ago

that makes me wonder whether your comment is made to look you smarter or dumber than you are

The Dunning-Kruger effect specifically talks about honest self-assessment, not artificial posturing to skew other's views of your intelligence.

and what that means in Dunning-Kruger effect's context.

I'm pretty sure you're trying to use Dunning and Kruger's work to assess things that weren't actually a part of the original study. There is little to no relevant self-assessment involved in making the neutral observation that people abuse the results of the studies to make themselves seem smarter (which, again, has nothing to do with the results of the original study).

defdac• 16 years ago

Note that David Dunning himself is commenting on the article.

dpritchett• 16 years ago

Strange how this meme has taken off in the last year or so. I first heard of it from Steve Yegge's blog in 2008, but it's been a regular feature on HN and Reddit in 2010.

Is there any impartial treatment of this subject that can make it easier to believe in? It sounds peachy but it's so easy for us to buy into that I'm skeptical.

Here's a Google Trends search on the term, looks like it spiked last fall and has been going strong ever since. http://www.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22dunning+kruger+effe...

jacksoncarter• 16 years ago

It could be that as one learns more about a topic, one learns more about what one doesn't know about a topic.

For example, if you know while, for, if/then and case statements you could think that's all you need to know about programming. But once you start getting into encryption and security, you realize there's a universe of knowledge out there and you're really dumb compared to that.

jgg4• 16 years ago

It could be that as one learns more about a topic, one learns more about what one doesn't know about a topic.

That's just it. If you've ever actually studied something (in order to really understand it, not just to pass a test), you already understand what goes on here. This whole discussion on competence and learning is stupid. For example, as I delve more into what's considered the "universe" of Lisp knowledge, I find more information and thus realize that there's more that I don't know than what I knew it was possible not to know. But I still know more than someone who's never studied Lisp at all.

In other words, there's not really much substance to a meme that's being perpetuated in blogs. Imagine that.

nandemo• 16 years ago

I hope you're saying that misinterpretation of the research is stupid, not the research itself.

What you and parent poster are saying was nicely illustrated by Alexander Pope in his Essay on Criticism:

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:

There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,

In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,

While from the bounded Level of our Mind,

Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize

New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!

So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,

Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;

Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,

And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:

But those attain'd, we tremble to survey

The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,

Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,

Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

hernan7• 16 years ago

They think they know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, those fools...

billswift2• 16 years ago

This is a duplicate - it was posted a day ago here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494732 which got fewer upvotes and no comments. This kind of thing actually discourages posts; the randomness of whether it will be noticed and of reinforcement (karma).

kungfooey• 16 years ago

Being the original submitter, I'm just glad to see it got the attention it deserves. :)

gruseom• 16 years ago

In this case the URLs differed by a trailing slash. Normally I do an auxiliary search to verify whether someone already submitted something, but I didn't have time yesterday.

I'm not sure I agree with the GP that the occasional duplicate is harmful. It may be that a small amount of randomness in these things contributes to the life of the site.

philk2• 16 years ago

I might be in the minority here but I have a hard time understanding why the Dunning-Kruger effect is interesting in the first place. The only real value I can see is to give bloggers a bit of pop psychology to throw into their articles.

ryne• 16 years ago

I find it interesting but not to the extent its permeated conversation outside of psychology. I remember cognitive dissonance had a similar standing in pop psychology a while back.

niels_olson• 16 years ago

I stumbled across this in my data from a survey of study habits vs performance in medical school. I didn't know it had a name at the time. Think of this from an employer's point of view, or a client's. Your employees (or contractors) think they're awesome, and thanks to the fundamental attribution error, you assume their confidence reflects competence. But, oh, how wrong you are.

philk2• 16 years ago

But it's not even that exciting. Your lousy employees think they're pretty good and your great employees think they're a bit better, but not awesome.

I suppose the main lesson you can draw from this is that you need to assess your employees performance independently, but I'm not sure that's a surprising conclusion.

scrame• 16 years ago

It might be that said bloggers are in the throws of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

And possibly trying to suss out which side they are on, by asserting that they understand it through a blog post.

haberman• 16 years ago

Here's my wild guess: the DK effect is nothing more than people's unfamiliarity with situations involving percentiles.

In school, <60% is failing. So intuitively 50% seems like a modest guess if you really suck at something.

If people were more familiar with situations where they were stack-ranked with their peers and saw numbers like 15%, their intuition would be better calibrated. The curve between estimated performance and actual performance has the right shape, it's just the calibration that's off.

But it became a popular phenomenon because it allowed people to project flattering beliefs about themselves onto scientific data.

What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn't

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