Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

Among the intelligentsia, the “Dunning-Kruger effect” is often smugly cited: it’s the idea that people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities while people with exceptional ability underestimate theirs. This is an attractive excuse for narcissists to feel superior, proving they’re special, and with a semblance of scientific rigor to support their claim. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence. Of course, the people making this claim see themselves as the superior ones, never even considering that perhaps they’ve misinterpreted the analysis. Even the astute observers who know the sham isn’t about intelligence will still explain the situation as overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task. There are a lot of studies in many different realms of expertise all exhibiting the same effect but because of preconceptions and selection bias, they all come to the same erroneous conclusion. However, the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect is actual far more mundane because the true deduction is more Occam’s razor than scientific. Data for the graph is obtained by people estimating their skill then an actual measurement is made. As per human nature, most people logically think they’re average, but of course some are better and some are worse; the graph simply demonstrates that natural phenomenon. It’s not that dumb people overestimate and smart people underestimate, it’s just the difference between the average and reality.