The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The cognitive bias by which people with low ability in a field overestimate their competence, while genuine experts tend to underestimate theirs.
Origin
Named after a 1999 paper by Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who tested undergraduates on grammar, logic, and humor. The lowest-scoring students rated their performance highest. Their explanation: the same skills you need to do something competently are the skills you need to know whether you're doing it competently — so the unskilled don't know they're unskilled. The graph (with a 'peak of Mount Stupid' followed by a 'valley of despair') circulating online is a popular embellishment, not the actual paper.
Modern usage
Now ordinary online vocabulary. 'Pure Dunning-Kruger' is the standard insult for someone confidently wrong; 'Mount Stupid' is the meme version. Used freely in workplace gossip and dating talk. The original research has been challenged repeatedly — some psychologists argue the effect is largely a statistical artifact — but the popular concept has long since outrun the science.
In the wild
After one course in genetics, he was lecturing biologists — peak Dunning-Kruger.— common usage
Tags