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"The less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know." I think that's an exaggeration and understood by most people to be one. What is, howe

"The less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know." I think that's an exaggeration and understood by most people to be one. What is, however, absolutely clear from the original study is that incompetent people have a highly inflated assessment on their own abilities: in all four experiments (!), the people with actual 10% abilities rated themselves at 50-70%. This is perfectly in line with eg. Urban Dictionary's definition[1]: "A phenomenon where people with little knowledge or skill think they know more or have more skill than they do." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning-Kruger%20effect http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning-Kruge... [1] Chosen intentionally because this is a "popular" source, not an academic one.

deleted 10y ago
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jurjenh 10y ago
The way I've come to see it is "The less you know about a subject, the less you think you don't know." In other words, you have no solid grasp on the field and so cannot make an effective guess at your ability in the field - so go for middle of the road and that's possibly your best statistical guess...
- jwdunne 10y ago
  In a way, it's pretty intuitive. Beginners are looking down the rabbit hole and think "well I've got this far so it can't go that much deeper can it"? They've got a CRUD app up and running and doing stuff - I remember I felt pretty invincible at that point. A prime example from experience: "oh I know development. I use PHP includes all the time". The biggest humbling exercise I do is to think back 6 months, 1 year and so on. I remember how much I thought I knew and what I produced (some stuff I'm still maintaining too, which is humbling in of itself). Realising how much I've learned between those times and realising I've barely made a dent both shows me how little I know and lights the " I must learn more" fire.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  While on the other end of the scale: "The more you know about the subject, the more you don't know." Which explains the upper-quintiles topping out at at 70th percentile mean self-rating.
inanutshellus 10y ago
One thing about Dunning-Kruger that I've never heard mentioned is self-esteem affecting one's answer. As in, if you explicitly mark a low score for yourself you're both divulging to others and admitting to yourself that you think you're a failure in that category. So imagine you're presented with one of these forms... what incentive/preventative is given to not let your ego's self-preservation instincts kick in and put you down as "average" (50%+) for anything and everything? Basically, I can't imagine how you'd account for the societal matter of bravado and I posit that it has an influence on the outcome of DK experiments. e.g. if you tried to account subvert bravado and had some kind of reward at the end to say "Hey, if you successfully guess your percentile for a given skill we'll give you a cookie." (which of course would incentivize you to put "0%" and intentionally bomb the test.)
- bendykstra 10y ago
  Maybe you could ask participants to rank their proficiencies in a collection of skills. Then they could be tested on some or all of those skills to see if their ranking is correct.
- lambda 10y ago
  They didn't ask people for their evaluations before the test; they asked after the test, and after it had been scored, to see where people thought their score ranked relative to the rest of the people who had taken the test. So, people already knew how many things they had gotten right and wrong when making their judgement. They just judged that most other people had also gotten a similar number wrong.
  - forrestthewoods 10y ago
    They can't possibly know the makeup of other test takers. I could be 95th percentile of the total population but still 10th percentile in a test room.
    - tamana 10y ago
      So?
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brownbat 10y ago
> What is, however, absolutely clear from the original study is that incompetent people have a highly inflated assessment on their own abilities: in all four experiments (!), the people with actual 10% abilities rated themselves at 50-70%. I'm not sure this result is as surprising or as explanatory as D & K advocate. If I ask you to estimate anything you have no experience measuring, then you'll probably ballpark around the average, maybe drift a bit above or below average based on how favorable you feel towards the thing you're measuring. That's exactly where everyone lands in the responses. It's not like people in the 10th percentile are suddenly rating themselves in the 99th percentile or anything, most people are taking a blind guess that they're doing ok, pulling their weight, just a bit above the middle of the pack. It shouldn't be surprising that this isn't correlated with performance, because "performance" and "evaluating the entire field of performers" rely on different skills and knowledge. You can be good at a thing and have never judged anyone else to rate them, let alone judged a sufficiently random sample of the population to get a sense for the average skill there. We shouldn't have ever expected these things were correlated to begin with. If you want to improve self assessment, don't just become more humble and self reflective, don't practice the subject in question, just go watch several random performers. Ranking what quartile you're in relies as much on knowing how random people do as it does on self evaluation.
ilitirit 10y ago
I'm sure there are certain fields where the amount you realise you do not know is proportional to how much you do know.

deleted 10y ago

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jurjenh 10y ago

The way I've come to see it is "The less you know about a subject, the less you think you don't know." In other words, you have no solid grasp on the field and so cannot make an effective guess at your ability in the field - so go for middle of the road and that's possibly your best statistical guess...

jwdunne 10y ago
In a way, it's pretty intuitive. Beginners are looking down the rabbit hole and think "well I've got this far so it can't go that much deeper can it"? They've got a CRUD app up and running and doing stuff - I remember I felt pretty invincible at that point. A prime example from experience: "oh I know development. I use PHP includes all the time". The biggest humbling exercise I do is to think back 6 months, 1 year and so on. I remember how much I thought I knew and what I produced (some stuff I'm still maintaining too, which is humbling in of itself). Realising how much I've learned between those times and realising I've barely made a dent both shows me how little I know and lights the " I must learn more" fire.
kafkaesq 10y ago
While on the other end of the scale: "The more you know about the subject, the more you don't know." Which explains the upper-quintiles topping out at at 70th percentile mean self-rating.

inanutshellus 10y ago

One thing about Dunning-Kruger that I've never heard mentioned is self-esteem affecting one's answer. As in, if you explicitly mark a low score for yourself you're both divulging to others and admitting to yourself that you think you're a failure in that category. So imagine you're presented with one of these forms... what incentive/preventative is given to not let your ego's self-preservation instincts kick in and put you down as "average" (50%+) for anything and everything? Basically, I can't imagine how you'd account for the societal matter of bravado and I posit that it has an influence on the outcome of DK experiments. e.g. if you tried to account subvert bravado and had some kind of reward at the end to say "Hey, if you successfully guess your percentile for a given skill we'll give you a cookie." (which of course would incentivize you to put "0%" and intentionally bomb the test.)

bendykstra 10y ago
Maybe you could ask participants to rank their proficiencies in a collection of skills. Then they could be tested on some or all of those skills to see if their ranking is correct.
lambda 10y ago
They didn't ask people for their evaluations before the test; they asked after the test, and after it had been scored, to see where people thought their score ranked relative to the rest of the people who had taken the test. So, people already knew how many things they had gotten right and wrong when making their judgement. They just judged that most other people had also gotten a similar number wrong.
- forrestthewoods 10y ago
  They can't possibly know the makeup of other test takers. I could be 95th percentile of the total population but still 10th percentile in a test room.
  - tamana 10y ago
    So?

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brownbat 10y ago

> What is, however, absolutely clear from the original study is that incompetent people have a highly inflated assessment on their own abilities: in all four experiments (!), the people with actual 10% abilities rated themselves at 50-70%. I'm not sure this result is as surprising or as explanatory as D & K advocate. If I ask you to estimate anything you have no experience measuring, then you'll probably ballpark around the average, maybe drift a bit above or below average based on how favorable you feel towards the thing you're measuring. That's exactly where everyone lands in the responses. It's not like people in the 10th percentile are suddenly rating themselves in the 99th percentile or anything, most people are taking a blind guess that they're doing ok, pulling their weight, just a bit above the middle of the pack. It shouldn't be surprising that this isn't correlated with performance, because "performance" and "evaluating the entire field of performers" rely on different skills and knowledge. You can be good at a thing and have never judged anyone else to rate them, let alone judged a sufficiently random sample of the population to get a sense for the average skill there. We shouldn't have ever expected these things were correlated to begin with. If you want to improve self assessment, don't just become more humble and self reflective, don't practice the subject in question, just go watch several random performers. Ranking what quartile you're in relies as much on knowing how random people do as it does on self evaluation.

ilitirit 10y ago

I'm sure there are certain fields where the amount you realise you do not know is proportional to how much you do know.