The Less You Know the More You Overestimate Yourself
The Dunning-Kruger effect explained.
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight and robbed them. He didn’t try to disguise himself and even smiled at the cameras. Later that night, he was arrested, as he had been recognised and identified on the security tapes.
When the police showed him the tapes, he was shocked. ‘But I wore the juice,’ he said. Mr Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing his face with lemon juice would make it invisible on video recordings. He was so confident about the lemon juice’s effects that he claimed the tapes were fake even after seeing them.
Research
The case inspired David Dunning and Justin Kruger to investigate why people perceive themselves as knowledgeable, even when they know very little about something.
The findings were revealing. In the paper: ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognising One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,’ they found that people routinely overestimate their abilities in logic, humour and grammar.
Subsequently, over 100 studies have found that people overestimate their driving skills, ability at work, leadership skills, maths, emotional intelligence and ethics. We rate…
