Dunning-Kruger effect

TL;DR

The **Dunning-Kruger Effect** is a cognitive bias where people with low ability in a domain overestimate their competence, while experts tend to underestimate theirs. It's a miscalibration between confidence and competence.

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Key Ideas

• Identified by psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999.
• Incompetent people often lack the skill to recognize their own lack of skill; this leads them to overestimate their knowledge or ability.
• Conversely, competent people tend to assume things are easier for others too, and may underestimate their own relative skill.
• The relationship between confidence and competence often follows a U-shaped curve splitted in four stages:
  1. Peak of “Mount Stupid”: when we know the least but feel the most confident;
  2. “Valley of Despair”: confidence drops as we gain a better (but still limited) understanding;
  3. “Slope of Enlightenment”: competence increases and confidence begins to recover;
  4. “Plateau of Sustainability”: we reach a stable level of knowledge and confidence based on real expertise.

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Identity Principle

«The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know.»

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Action Idea

• Regularly check your confidence against objective feedback.
• When you feel certain about a complex topic with little experience, pause and ask: What might I be missing?

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TGD

• Impostor Syndrome
• Cognitive Biases

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Related Notes

• Shuhari

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Source

• Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments – Dunning & Kruger (1999)