Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

Dunning-Kruger effect: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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Dunning-Krugereffect1 CONSTRUCTDunning-KrugerKRUGER & DUNNING · DKE

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Social Psychology

The tendency of low performers to overestimate their own competence

Justin Kruger and David Dunning first identified the effect in 1999 in Unskilled and unaware of it, reporting that people who scored in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, logic, and grammar substantially overestimated their own performance, while the highest scorers slightly underestimated theirs. They attributed the pattern to a metacognitive shortfall, meaning a difficulty in judging one's own thinking: the same limited skill that produces poor performance also limits a person's ability to recognize that the performance is poor, so the least competent are the least equipped to gauge their own competence. David Dunning's 2011 review consolidated a decade of replications across many domains and framed the effect as a general problem of self-insight rather than a quirk of any one task. The construct is distinctive in that it places objective performance and self-assessment on the same scale and studies the gap between them, and it is identified by comparing a person's predicted percentile rank against their actual rank within a single sample rather than by asking people about their confidence in the abstract.[1][2][3]

Unit
A gap, in percentile or score points, between a person's self-rated and objectively measured competence on a given task
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Measured by comparing a person's self-estimated performance or predicted percentile rank against their objectively scored performance on the same task, within one sample

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Nearby constructs

competence5 fields · 5 citationsjingle · one word, five constructsoverconfidence4 fields · 6 citationsjingle · one word, four constructsbias6 fields · 8 citationsjingle · one name, six constructs

References

  1. Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121
  2. Dunning, D. (2011). The Dunning–Kruger effect: On being ignorant of one's own ignorance. In J. M. Olson & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 44, pp. 247–296). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-385522-0.00005-6
  3. Ehrlinger, J., Johnson, K., Banner, M., Dunning, D., & Kruger, J. (2008). Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 105(1), 98–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2007.05.002

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