The Dunning-Kruger effect describes people’s overestimate of their own expertise and their unawareness of their incompetence in grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm safety, debating, and financial acumen.

Cornell’s Stav Atir and  Emily Rosenzweig of Tulane asked volunteers if they were familiar with concepts like centripetal force and photon as well as fictitious terms including plates of parallax, ultra-lipid, and cholarine.

About 90% of participants claimed some knowledge of at least one of the nine fake concepts.
People who thought they were most knowledgeable also said they recognized more of the meaningless terms.

Atir and Rosenzweig concluded that low performers lack insight about their skill deficits because they ”don’t know what they don’t know.”

Another study, by University of California San Diego’s Elanor Williams, Justin Kruger of NYU, and Cornell’s David Dunning asked volunteers to complete a logical reasoning task, an intuitive physics problem, and a financial challenge.

Participants who achieved no correct answers expressed the same degree of confidence as the most able performers.

Even 80 professionally-credentialed physical scientists at top universities provided a number of inaccurate purpose-based (“teleological”) explanations about “why things happen” in the natural world.  These results are noteworthy because most physical scientists’ reject purpose-based explanations for natural phenomena.

When these professional scientists provided explanations under time constraints, they were twice as likely to endorse inaccurate rationales, reported Boston University’s Deborah Kelemen, Joshua Rottman, and Rebecca Seston.

Scientists, who had more relevant training, were equally likely as humanities scholars to endorse inaccurate arguments. 

Both high and low achievers made judgments said they felt confident because they had a clear rationale for decisions, even though these were “intuitive rules” rather than empirically-based.
Williams’ team concluded, “Rule-based confidence is no guarantee of self-insight into performance.”

Most people seem to hold pseudo-scientific explanations as “a default explanatory preference,” a mindset that could explain the appeal of myth and religion across cultures.

Similarly, people who filed for bankruptcy said they had high confidence in their financial acumen, though their financial management skills didn’t keep them solvent.

More than 25,000 people rated their financial knowledge and completed the 2012 National Financial Capability Study, conducted by the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority with the U.S. Treasury.
Of these, 800 respondents said they filed bankruptcy within the previous two years.

Bankruptcy filers achieved financial knowledge scores in the lowest third of respondents, but they rated their knowledge more positively than financially-solvent respondents.
Nearly a quarter of the recently bankrupted respondents gave themselves the highest possible rating, whereas only 13 percent of financially-solvent respondents were equally confident.

Most people hold a positive view of their capabilities even when faced with contrary evidence.
However, women may hold an unrealistically modest view of their capabilities despite affirming feedback.
These biases in self assessment suggest the importance of realistic recalibration of confidence, aligned with consensual feedback.

-*How do you minimize the risks of “Clueless Confidence”?

-*How can systematic underestimates of competence be reduced to increase “Realistic Confidence”?

Related Posts:

Useful Fiction: Optimism Bias of Positive Illusions

Least Skillful Performers May Have Greatest Illusions of Competence

©Kathryn Welds