Dunning-Kruger Effect

Not unrelated to the previous post...

"Dunning-Kruger effect (dun'-eng kroo'-guhr e-fekt') noun. The phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge or skill tend to think they know more or have more skill than they do, while simultaneously overlooking or underestimating the knowledge and skills of others.

Usage example: There's this guy in my pickup league who couldn't hit a shot if a genie gave him three wishes and he used all three to do it...but he always chucks it up without conscience. He must be suffering from Dunning-Kruger effect.

Word history: The term is based on a series experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both of Cornell University, the results of which were published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in December 1999. Here's an explanation from the 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 four 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.

Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.

Thus, most people think they're better than they really are, but they're too stupid to realize it. And that same stupidity makes it difficult (and sometimes impossible) for them to recognize skills and competence in the non-stupids, which perpetuates their cycle of idiocy and megalomania."

Would anyone like to discuss the implications of this for ministry? ;)