Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

Abstract

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

“…We also explored this relationship by regressing percentile estimates on actual percentiles. This analysis supported the linear trend above (B = .142, SE = .068, β = .219, t(87) = 2.097, p = .039).Paired t tests confirm some of Kruger and Dunning's (1999) findings. In both conditions, those in the bottom quartile overestimated their percentile, and those in the top quartile underestimated theirs.…”

“…The well-known above-average effect turns out to be only half the picture. On difficult tasks, the average person thinks he or she is performing below average.Our studies replicate, eliminate, or reverse the association between task performance and judgment accuracy reported by Kruger and Dunning (1999) as a function of task difficulty. On easy tasks, where there is a positive bias, the best performers are also the most accurate in estimating their standing, but on difficult tasks, where there is a negative bias, the worst performers are the most accurate.…”

“…The overestimation comes mostly from poor performers. Figure 1 summarizes results from studies by Kruger and Dunning (1999) showing this effect. Kruger and Dunning (1999; argue that this happens because people who perform poorly at a task also lack the metacognitive skill to realize that they have performed poorly.…”

“…Figure 1 summarizes results from studies by Kruger and Dunning (1999) showing this effect. Kruger and Dunning (1999; argue that this happens because people who perform poorly at a task also lack the metacognitive skill to realize that they have performed poorly. On the other hand, people who are more skilled have both the ability to perform well and the ability to accurately assess the superiority of their performance.…”

“…People's ability to estimate their relative performance is largely determined by the kind of feedback they receive, and how they use it. Relevant feedback may be accumulated over a long time to produce a general sense of one's own ability in a domain compared to others.Other feedback is more immediate, indicating how well a particular performance is going.Relative performance judgments will be affected by feedback about one's own performance, as well as feedback about the average performance of others and about the dispersion of performances.Most of the tasks used by Kruger and Dunning (1999), Krueger and Mueller (2002), and us provided participants with little specific information about how they were doing in an absolute sense, or about how their peers performed. For example, participants were not told whether their quiz answers were correct or not, and were not told what the average score was.…”