Saturday, July 04, 2015

I'm bad, you know it - the Dunning-Kruger effect

If you know you are bad at something, you would just avoid doing it. Right? Thanks to how our brains work, no. David Dunning and Justin Kruger, two psychologists from Cornell University, showed that people who are really bad at something, tend to think they're really good at it. The most competent people will usually underestimate their abilities. The rest of us overestimate our abilities, and the worse we are at something, the more we overestimate our abilities.

"Incompetent people cannot recognize just how incompetent they are" said Dunning. You need some skill at something to know how good at it you are. It isn't possible to tell if you suck, if you're too bad to know what sucking involves.

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