Willful Stupidity or them that don’t know that they don’t know are absolutely positive they do know

August 12, 2009 at 7:15 pm (Commentary)
Tags: ability, cognitive, competence, incompetence, metacognition, personality, psychology, self-assessment, self-awareness, skill, study

A PDF of – Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own
Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University submitted this paper to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology where it was published in 1999.

The overview:

“People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The  authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these  domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make  unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4  studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them
recognize the limitations of their abilities.”

Easy political jokes abound here.

So I’ll say, instead: “I’ve had that guy in at least 10 of my classes!!”