There’s one in every class. You know, that guy. The one who swears he is doomed to fail the final, only to sheepishly admit that he got a 96 once grades come out. On the other hand, we also all have that one friend who thinks he knows everything… and then fails.
These behaviors are reproducible across a wide range of groups and different tasks, and are explained by scientific research. The trend even has its own name: the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The eponymous psychologists who first studied this effect, David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University, were originally inspired by a bizarre story they heard on the news. In 1995, 44-year-old McArthur Wheeler, walked into two Pittsburg banks and robbed them in plain daylight. Later that evening, the banks’ surveillance tapes were played on TV and within an hour Wheeler was caught.
He was dumbfounded. He demanded to know how the cops had found him. “I was wearing the juice!” he said. The police officers were understandably confused. What juice? Wheeler explained that he had splashed lemon juice on his face, certain that this would make his image blurry or invisible to cameras. His ignorance had given him a misguided confidence that ultimately led to his arrest.
Dunning and Kruger’s research showed that incompetency can lead to similarly distorted estimations of one’s own abilities in areas as diverse as logic, grammar and even humor. Again and again they showed that the people who score poorly are also the most likely to overestimate their own skills. Specifically, they found that the bottom quartile of performers, averaging out at the 12th percentile, estimated that they had scored in the 62nd percentile.
Dunning and Kruger explain that the skills needed to do well on the tests are the same skills needed to gauge one’s performance. “Unskilled individuals suffer a dual burden,” they argue. “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” In psychology jargon, this is referred to as impaired metacognition.
Skilled individuals are far more accurate in their self-assessments. However, they are prone to underestimate their ranking in a group because they assume that everyone else is just as smart as they are. Thus, poor performers have distorted views of themselves and high scorers have distorted views of others.
The nervous kid in your class who got a 96 percent, then, is acutely aware of the four points he missed and assumes the entire class will get the other ninety-six right easily. Meanwhile, the “know-it-all” with a 2.0 GPA is genuinely unaware of just how much he doesn’t know.
Perhaps Charles Darwin and Thomas Jefferson explained the Dunning-Kruger effect best: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than knowledge,” said Darwin, while Jefferson observed that, “He who knows best knows how little he knows.” Dunning and Kruger have at long last provided scientific evidence for something scholars (and college students) have suspected for centuries.