Unskilled and Unaware of It – The Dunning Kruger Effect

I came across a very interesting phenomenon today. Something i have known and observed for a very long time. I often wondered that in our business (Technology) people who generally rate themselves high, are in general not that competent. For example,  i have had bosses in a software company , who were MBAs, who always thought they bring more value to the company as compared to those people who actually build stuff they are selling.

Then i came across the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and everything fell into place for me. Dunning and Kruger were awarded the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for their report, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”

As per wikipedia “Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.” further more “the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others”

in contrast to high performers, “poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve.” , because they already miscalculate their abilities to be higher than others.

I found the study fascinating, i think you will too. You can get the full study here