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Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

Justin Kruger and David Dunning

Journal of Personal and Social Psychology

January 2000

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.

www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_and_Unaware_of_It_How_Difficulties_in_Recognizing_One's_Own_Incompetence_Lead_to_Inflated_Self-Assessments

NOTE:  "metacognitive competence" means your ability to think about how you think.

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect is often cited by intellectuals to put lesser individuals in their places, lower in the hierarchy, of course.  It's a snark that says, "We are smarter than you, and therefore we are right, and you are wrong.  So shut up."

Professors Justin Kruger and David Dunning emphasize that overestimating our own level of knowledge or competence affects us all.  Tell that to those citing the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Over the decades, I have accumulated examples of experts in their own fields of knowledge who have made incredible, even catastrophic mistakes which they could have, should have, avoided, had they been somewhat more circumspect or cautious.

1.  Medical malpractice in America kills an estimated 250,000 to 400,000 patients annually.  (Mayo Clinic)

2.   On March 27, 1977 – The Worst aviation disaster in history – Captain Jacob Veldhuyzen van Zanten, senior test pilot for KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, began his takeoff roll without clearance from the tower. His Copilot Mears advised him that ATC had not yet given takeoff clearance. Van Zanten said, “No I know that” but continued his roll, crashing into PanAm Flight 1736, killing 583 passengers and crew members at Los Rodeos Airport, Tenerife. Flight engineer just before collision, “Is he not clear then?” Captain van Zanten, “Oh yes.” Crash. Captain van Zanten, age 50, was the chief training pilot for KLM.

3.  According to the World Health Organization, more than 2.5 million deaths are linked to unsafe care in hospitals every year. (www.news4jax.com, 2023)

4.  The Semmelweis reflex or "Semmelweis effect" is a metaphor for the reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs, or paradigms.^[1]

The term derives from the name of Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian physician who discovered in 1847 that childbed fever mortality rates fell ten-fold when doctors disinfected their hands with a chlorine solution before moving from one patient to another, or, most particularly, after an autopsy. (At one of the two maternity wards at the university hospital where Semmelweis worked, physicians performed autopsies on every deceased patient.) Semmelweis's procedure saved many lives by stopping the ongoing contamination of patients (mostly pregnant women) with what he termed "cadaverous particles", twenty years before germ theory was discovered.^[2] Despite the overwhelming empirical evidence, his fellow doctors rejected his hand-washing suggestions, often for non-medical reasons. For instance, some doctors refused to believe that a gentleman's hands could transmit disease.^[3]

In the preface to the fiftieth anniversary edition of his book The Myth of Mental Illness, Thomas Szasz says that Semmelweis's biography impressed upon him at a young age, a "deep sense of the invincible social power of false truths."^[5]

5.  In 1983, Barry Marshall and John Warren presented a paper to the Australian Gastroenterological Society claiming that stomach ulcers are caused by infection of Helicobacter pylori. They never finished their presentation because they were laughed off the stage. They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 for their discovery. It took twenty-two years before they were awarded the Nobel Prize.

6.  The largest scientific experiment in history was Peer Reviewed itself and it failed

By Jo Nova

Peer Review has been a sixty-year experiment with no control group.

It’s touted as the “gold standard” of science, yet the evidence shows Peer Review is an abject failure.

There are 30,000 scientific journals that publish nearly 5 million articles a year, and the only thing we know for sure is that two-thirds of papers with major flaws will still get published, fraud is almost never discovered, and peer review has effectively crushed groundbreaking new discoveries.

7.   "The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have  all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote.... Our future discoveries must be

looked for in the sixth place of decimals."  -Albert. A. Michelson, speech given in 1894 at the dedication of Ryerson Physics Lab, Univ. of Chicago,

 

  "It is apparent to me that the possibilities of the aeroplane, which two  or three years ago were thought to hold the solution to the  [flying machine] problem, have been exhausted, and that we must turn elsewhere."     - Thomas Edison, 1895

 

"Such startling announcements as these should be deprecated as being  unworthy of science and mischievous to its true progress." - Sir William Siemens, 1880, on Edison's announcement of a successful light bulb.

 

  "We are probably nearing the limit of all we can know about astronomy.   - Simon Newcomb, astronomer, 1888

 

  "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." - Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

 

  "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains  is more and more precise measurement"  - Lord Kelvin, 1900

 

  "The demonstration that no possible combination of known substances, known forms of machinery, and known forms of force can be united in a practicable machine by which men shall fly for long distances through the air, seems to the writer as complete as it is possible for the  demonstration of any physical fact to be."  - astronomer S. Newcomb, 1906

"There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will."- Albert Einstein, 1932. 

 

Conclusion