O’Brien 1 Matthew O’Brien Professor Sanatoi ENGL 101-025 20 November 2022 An Examination of the Dunning Kruger Effect and how it Affects our Society On January 6, 1995, McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson committed an armed robbery on the Swissvale and Brighton Heights banks. Interestingly, they did not wear any disguise. They had instead lathered their faces with lemon juice, believing it would make them invisible to security cameras. Johnson and Wheeler both received multi-year sentences. When Wheeler was shown the security footage that had identified him, he was shocked. He stated “But I wore the lemon juice. I wore lemon juice.”. Instead of disguising themselves, they had covered their faces with lemon juice, believing it would make them invisible to security cameras. Wheeler recalled that Johnson had told him that if they wore lemon juice during the bank robbery, their faces would not appear on camera, and they wouldn’t be able to be identified. Wheeler tested this himself by taking a picture of himself with a polaroid camera, and when he examined the picture, he was not in it. He was then convinced that their plan would work and went ahead with the robbery. There are some theories on why he didn’t see himself in the photograph, such as that he had used bad film, or that he had accidentally pointed the camera in the wrong direction. This story was the main inspiration for David Dunning and Justin Kruger to begin their research on the “Dunning-Kruger effect”, a cognitive bias in which people in a field with a low O’Brien 2 amount of experience and expertise in said field overestimate their own ability and knowledge. It is also believed that the opposite is true for people with a high amount of experience and expertise, who instead of overestimating, underestimate their skills. How can this effect be seen everywhere in our lives, from individual peoples to society as a whole? Dunning and Kruger conducted four studies to verify their theory. The four studies were on humor, logical thinking, grammar, and training. All studies were found to confirm Dunning and Kruger's theories and predictions. For example, the first study on humor was done to explore people's perceptions of their competence in a skill that required knowledge and wisdom about the tastes and reactions of others. The researchers contacted eight comedians and gave them a 30-item questionnaire with a series of jokes and were asked to judge each joke on how funny they were on a scale of one to eleven. One being “not at all funny” and eleven being “very funny”. The participants were then asked to grade the jokes on the questionnaire using the same system the comedians used, only this time their answers would be graded by how close their results were to the results of the comedians. After they rated the jokes, they were then asked to compare their own ability to recognize what's funny with that of the average Cornell student using a percentile rating. The rankings ranged from 0 (I'm at the very bottom) to 50 (I'm exactly average) to 99 (I'm at the very top). On average, participants put their ability to recognize what is funny in the 66th percentile, which exceeded the actual mean percentile (50) by 16 percentile points. This overestimation occurred O’Brien 3 even though self-ratings of ability were significantly correlated with the measure of actual ability. Participants who scored in the bottom percentile (16) were found to grossly overestimate their abilities compared to the other participants, on average putting themselves in the 58 th percentile. Interestingly, participants who scored in the highest percentiles ranked themselves on average 15 points below their actual score. Dunning and Kruger state that this phenomenon stems from the "dual burden." People are incompetent, and their incompetence disallows them to realize how inept they are. Incompetent people fail at recognizing their own mistakes and lack of skill, and recognizing the genuine skill of other, actually skilled people. In short, the knowledge and skills necessary to be good at a task are the same qualities that a person needs to recognize that they are not good at that task. This cause of this effect has a few explanations. One is that people only evaluate themselves from their own limited and subjective point of view. To themselves they seem to have more knowledge and skill than others. Because of this, they sometimes struggle to have a realistic view of their abilities. They hold so little knowledge that they believe they are experts. Some other explanations are taking mental shortcuts and the phenomena of attempting to find patterns where there are none. The opposite is true for competent people, who tend to underestimate their skill level. They do this because they have a greater grasp of their fields of expertise and recognize their own faults and flaws. O’Brien 4 The Dunning Kruger effect affects our society in numerous ways. One way is that competent people keep their skill and knowledge to themselves, preventing them from striving to learn more and stopping them from teaching others. This contrasts to incompetent people’s overconfidence, who often put themselves in the spotlight. This has a detrimental effect on democracy, since the most uninformed citizens are also the most confident. Ignorant people are extremely resistant to being taught (they believe they know best). They also share the most information and misinformation. This effect has dangerous consequences. Politicians may benefit from having a more uneducated audience, since people who are less informed of political and world issues are more likely to believe what they say. They also share their misinformation with others, spreading their ignorance. In contrast, those who are more informed on politics are more likely to avoid political discussion and voting, believing themselves to be inadequately informed. Although other, even more competent people may realize their own skill and knowledge, they refrain from engaging because they are not aware of how rare their level competence is. The Dunning Kruger effect affects our society by giving incompetent people the spotlight and keeping competent people out of the picture. Works cited Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own ... (n.d.). Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_and_Unaware_of_It_How_ O’Brien 5 Difficulties_in_Recognizing_One's_Own_Incompetence_Lead_to_Inflated_SelfAssessments Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). What know-it-alls don't know, or the illusion of competence. Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/story/what-know-it-alls-dont-know-or-the-illusion-ofcompetence Mahmood, K. (n.d.). Do people overestimate their information literacy skills? A systematic review of empirical evidence on the dunning-kruger effect. PDXScholar. Retrieved November 28, 2022, from https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/comminfolit/vol10/iss2/3/ Read2018-03-19T14:15:00+00:00, D. (2018, March 19). Dunning-kruger: The gap between prediction and performance. RSC Education. Retrieved December 5, 2022, from https://edu.rsc.org/education-research/dunning-kruger-the-gap-between-prediction-andperformance/3008795.article
