The Dunning-Kruger effect is a distortion of thought that could be summed up as follows: stupid people think they are smarter than those who really are, and intelligent people think they are stupider, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say: the ignorant are sure they know a lot, and those who know a lot think they are ignorant.
This curious effect was discovered by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two American researchers at Cornell University, the first was a professor of psychology and one day read a story that left him perplexed, the case of a robbery committed by a 44-year-old. -an old man named McArthur Wheeler. La the news said he had invaded two coasts, without a mask and in broad daylight. He was captured a few hours later.
- What caught Dunning’s attention was the thief’s explanation of his method of aggression.
- He said he had not worn a mask.
- But that lemon juice had been applied to his face.
- He hoped this would make the security cameras invisible.
Why would I believe this nonsense?seeing that he had not concentrated on his face, but on the ceiling. “How can anyone be so stupid?” asked David Dunning.
After much thought about the thief’s conduct, Dunning asked a question that would serve as a hypothesis for his subsequent investigation: could it be that an incompetent does not realize his own incompetence, precisely for this reason?The question sounded like a twist, but it certainly didn’t make sense.
It was then that he proposed to his best disciple, the young Justin Kruger, to conduct a formal investigation into the matter, in this way they organized a group of volunteers to conduct an experiment, each participant was asked how effective they thought they were. in three areas: grammar, logical reasoning and humor. A test was then applied to assess your actual competence in each of these questions.
The results of the experiment confirmed what Dunning and Kruger already suspected: in fact, people who had defined themselves as “very competent” in each area got the lowest test scores, on the contrary, people who had initially been underestimated had the best test results.
Today it is very common to see people speaking with apparent authority on topics they know only superficially, at the same time it is normal that true experts are not so categorical in their statements, because they are aware of the breadth of knowledge. and the difficulty of being completely sure of something.
The organizers of this study not only noticed that this cognitive bias existed, but also realized that the most incompetent people underestimated the most competent, as a result, were safer and had a much greater sense of their abilities, despite their ignorance. , perhaps, that’s precisely why.
After conducting the experiment, the researchers came to four conclusions that make up the Dunning-Kruger effect:
Once the distorting effect of these individuals was established, the question remained as to why this was going on. Dunning and Kruger established that cognitive bias occurred because the skills needed to do something right are the same as those required to evaluate performance. words, how do you realize something is wrong if you don’t even know how to do it?
High-performance people also had cognitive bias. In this case, the researchers determined that what happened was a misperception known as “false consensus. “This mistake means that people tend to overestimate the degree of consensus with others.
Surely you have seen two people involved in an argument and finally, to solve it, they decide to ask a third party for help to get out of the dispute, initially considered neutral by both parties, in this case, the false consensus would act when both parties were convinced of that the impartial observer would have the same opinion as yours.
Something similar happens to people who do well in an activity: they find it so easy to do so that they see no reason to suspect that most people can’t do as well as they do.