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Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
14 pages, Unknown Binding
Published January 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 28, 2019
Short, well-written, humorous paper introducing the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The fascinating twist in this paper is experiment 4 when the authors attempt to prove that increased competence equals increased metacognition. Metacognition of what? Superior and inferior, or competent and incompetent, performances.
The incompetent fail to learn from experience. This is critical. Only training gives them the ability to detect competence.
Not only that, but competent people falsely underestimate their ability and presume that others have the same capacity as they do, just as incompetent people overestimate their ability.
The article notes the rarity of real feedback, and the way feedback is attributed falsely to bad luck or circumstances.
Altogether a fascinating study of human knowledge and ignorance, and a definite advance in the field of human wisdom.
The fascinating twist in this paper is experiment 4 when the authors attempt to prove that increased competence equals increased metacognition. Metacognition of what? Superior and inferior, or competent and incompetent, performances.
The incompetent fail to learn from experience. This is critical. Only training gives them the ability to detect competence.
Not only that, but competent people falsely underestimate their ability and presume that others have the same capacity as they do, just as incompetent people overestimate their ability.
The article notes the rarity of real feedback, and the way feedback is attributed falsely to bad luck or circumstances.
Altogether a fascinating study of human knowledge and ignorance, and a definite advance in the field of human wisdom.
July 20, 2023
I’m not a scientist. Reading this paper was relatively easy but there were certainly points I couldn’t grasp in my head therefore giving it 5 stars would be strange for me. Ironically I don’t know how to evaluate such a paper. Mostly I do it based on gut feeling.
It is a scientific study paper not adapted to a lay person like me. Nevertheless, the parts that I did understand impressed me. It was fun to see the graphs showing the degrees of confidence compared to actual results. That helps to explain the fact that most people think the impossible - they are above average. I’m sure I do the same. I’ve read enough to understand that I’m not an outlier and fall prey to the same biases that affected the people in the study.
It was exciting to see how the participants confidence levels changed in studies 3 and 4.
It is a scientific study paper not adapted to a lay person like me. Nevertheless, the parts that I did understand impressed me. It was fun to see the graphs showing the degrees of confidence compared to actual results. That helps to explain the fact that most people think the impossible - they are above average. I’m sure I do the same. I’ve read enough to understand that I’m not an outlier and fall prey to the same biases that affected the people in the study.
It was exciting to see how the participants confidence levels changed in studies 3 and 4.
March 22, 2024
It’s rare to get a scientific journal article that’s well written, interesting, and funny, but this one did it.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews