Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence

Abstract

Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.

Knowing what you know: Intellectual humility and judgments of recognition memory

“…The lack of a relationship between intellectual humility and response bias was unexpected. One might assume that people low in intellectual humility would be more likely to respond that they knew things that they did not know than intellectually humble people (i.e., a bias to respond that all items were old or known; Dunning et al, 2003;Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Interestingly, although they were not biased to think they knew things that they did not, intellectually arrogant participants were more confident in their incorrect answers on the old/new recognition task.…”

“…The meta-cognitive bias to have greater faith in one's beliefs than is warranted obviously compromises the quality of people's decisions and leads to misguided actions that are based on incorrect assumptions. Although the tendency to overestimate the accuracy of one's beliefs is widespread (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003;Fischhoff, Slovic, & Lichtenstein, 1977), people differ in the degree to which they recognize that what they believe to be true might be incorrect. For example, people who are less knowledgeable in a domain are less able to assess the limits of their understanding than those who are more knowledgeable (Kruger & Dunning, 1999).…”

Training self-assessment and task-selection skills: A cognitive approach to improving self-regulated learning

“…Self-assessment may also be hampered by several biases that may cause learners to depend on the wrong kind of cues to assess their performance (for a review, see Bjork, 1999), such as hindsight bias (i.e., once an answer or solution procedure is known, e.g., after feedback, students are more likely to think that they could have produced it themselves), or availability bias (i.e., answers that come to mind easily are not only more likely to be provided but are also more likely to be assumed correct). Moreover, accurate self-assessment also seems to require some domain expertise (Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004;Dunning, Johnson, Erlinger, & Kruger, 2003). Individuals with higher levels of prior knowledge have been found to be more accurate selfassessors.…”

“…For example, a study by Tsivitanidou, Zacharia, and Hovardas (2011) investigated unsupported peer-assessment practices by students and the results showed that the overlap between assessment criteria formulated by the students themselves and assessment criteria determined by experts was very low. Individuals with more prior knowledge might be more accurate self-assessors because their experience provides them with more knowledge of the criteria and standards that good performance should meet (Dunning et al, 2003(Dunning et al, , 2004.…”

A utilitarian argument against torture interrogation of terrorists

“…(Their over-confidence accords with the general tendency for poor performers on cognitive tasks to overestimate greatly their performance success.) 88 In fact, behavioral signs of deceit differ across liars and constitute only a small effect.…”