AmpedTraining Blog
2009 September 7 | 4 Comments »
By Matt
Last week, or whenever that last T-Mag debacle was going on, I mentioned something called the Dunning-Kruger effect a few times. I had originally planned to write up a short research review on this beforehand, but the debacle was just to timely to ignore it.
In any case, this phenomenon is an interesting example of a cognitive bias – that is, a thought process which blinds us or distracts us from objective reality. The Dunning-Kruger effect is what you see when someone incompetent or unqualified judges his/her ability as being far higher than it actually is. In comparison, people that are competent tend to much more conservative and underestimate their own ability.
It really is just a formalization of all the old adages about being smart enough to realize how little you know; people really are too stupid to know they’re stupid. I think a lot of readers thought I was just making it up, but Dunning and Kruger have actually had several papers published on the subject. This is a very real thing, and it has some very interesting implications.
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