Usually when I see the term Dunning-Kruger Effect stated on an internet discussion, I usually chalk it up to a dumb person trying to sound smart calling someone else dumb. But this paper, if it's not an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect itself, argues that the term is often misapplied or may even just be an artifact of intellectual discourse and most importantly that the misinterpretation, perhaps ironically, has more to do with people being misinformed as opposed to uninformed. Which honestly, I think a lot of people assumed already, but its overuse on the internet distorted the meaning never the less.
Of course it's not just internet discussions that have warped the research of this 1999 paper. Thousands of news articles ranging from the highly respected New York Times to the BBC and New Scientist have vomited forth the Dunning-Kruger Effect and their interpretation of it as being gospel when it comes to explaining bias in the human mind.
Long story short or tldr:
- The Dunning-Kruger effect was originally described in 1999 as the observation that people who are terrible at a particular task think they are much better than they are, while people who are very good at it tend to underestimate their competence
- The Dunning-Kruger effect was never about “dumb people not knowing they are dumb” or about “ignorant people being very arrogant and confident in their lack of knowledge.”
- Because the effect can be seen in random, computer-generated data, it may not be a real flaw in our thinking and thus may not really exist
The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real
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...
www.mcgill.ca
Of course it's not just internet discussions that have warped the research of this 1999 paper. Thousands of news articles ranging from the highly respected New York Times to the BBC and New Scientist have vomited forth the Dunning-Kruger Effect and their interpretation of it as being gospel when it comes to explaining bias in the human mind.
Long story short or tldr:
- The Dunning-Kruger effect was originally described in 1999 as the observation that people who are terrible at a particular task think they are much better than they are, while people who are very good at it tend to underestimate their competence
- The Dunning-Kruger effect was never about “dumb people not knowing they are dumb” or about “ignorant people being very arrogant and confident in their lack of knowledge.”
- Because the effect can be seen in random, computer-generated data, it may not be a real flaw in our thinking and thus may not really exist