A link to “Don’t know enough to know that they don’t know,” a very intriguing 2010 web posting by Matt Young on how not-so-bright-students tend to grossly overestimate their own abilities, was sent to me today (August 3, 2012) by Forum contributor Frank A. Tucker. Young says this finding, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect after the Cornell University researchers who made the study, indicated that college students who scored in the lowest quartile on several tests grossly overestimated their own abilities compared to everyone else’s, probably because they did not know enough to know that they did not know, but that oddly, students in the highest quartile slightly underestimated their own abilities.
DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT CHART AND ILLUSTRATION SUPPLIED SEPTEMBER 18, 2017
The paper by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” appeared in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, Vol.7, No. 6 1121-1134.
Read Matt Young’s “Don’t know enough to know that they don’t know” in Panda’sThumb now!Read the full text of the Dunning-Kruger paper as posted on the web by ResearchGate.net
