My favourite example of this is the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which people who are incompetent at tasks do not realize they are incompetent -- because they don'

My favourite example of this is the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which people who are incompetent at tasks do not realize they are incompetent -- because they don't know what competence looks like. So they assume they're doing "okay", or even above-average, even when objective tests show otherwise: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect I read at the time that the reverse is also true -- the very competent tend to assume similar levels of competence in everyone, so they are unaware how good they are. However, this wikipedia page makes no mention of that part.