Who said the dumber people think you are

Share this quote:. Like Quote. Recommend to friends. To see what your friends thought of this quote, please sign up! Tyler books view quotes. Jan 27, AM. Karley books view quotes. Dec 18, AM. Sherimi 5 books view quotes. Feb 11, PM. Histrio 1, books view quotes.

Jan 29, PM. Jacob books view quotes. Jan 18, PM. Elin books view quotes. Dec 20, PM. Jan 07, AM. Jazmin books view quotes.

Sep 16, AM. Shyanne 3 books view quotes. Aug 11, AM. Prime 0 books view quotes. Jun 10, AM. Morgast 1, books view quotes. Apr 11, PM. Tony books view quotes. Apr 04, PM. Michael 12, books view quotes. Feb 06, AM. Anthony 3, books view quotes. Jul 29, PM. Skyler books view quotes. May 30, PM. This phenomenon is something you have likely experienced in real life, perhaps around the dinner table at a holiday family gathering.

Throughout the course of the meal, a member of your extended family begins spouting off on a topic at length, boldly proclaiming that he is correct and that everyone else's opinion is stupid, uninformed, and just plain wrong. It may be plainly evident to everyone in the room that this person has no idea what they are talking about, yet they prattle on, blithely oblivious to their own ignorance. The effect is named after researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the two social psychologists who first described it.

In their original study on this psychological phenomenon, they performed a series of four investigations. People who scored in the lowest percentiles on tests of grammar, humor, and logic also tended to dramatically overestimate how well they had performed their actual test scores placed them in the 12th percentile, but they estimated that their performance placed them in the 62nd percentile.

In one experiment, for example, Dunning and Kruger asked their 65 participants to rate how funny different jokes were. Some of the participants were exceptionally poor at determining what other people would find funny—yet these same subjects described themselves as excellent judges of humor.

Incompetent people, the researchers found, are not only poor performers, they are also unable to accurately assess and recognize the quality of their own work. This is the reason why students who earn failing scores on exams sometimes feel that they deserved a much higher score. They overestimate their own knowledge and ability and are incapable of seeing the poorness of their performance.

Low performers are unable to recognize the skill and competence levels of other people, which is part of the reason why they consistently view themselves as better, more capable, and more knowledgeable than others. This effect can have a profound impact on what people believe, the decisions they make, and the actions they take. In one study, Dunning and Ehrlinger found that women performed equally to men on a science quiz, and yet women underestimated their performance because they believed they had less scientific reasoning ability than men.

The researchers also found that as a result of this belief, these women were more likely to refuse to enter a science competition. Dunning and his colleagues have also performed experiments in which they ask respondents if they are familiar with a variety of terms related to subjects including politics, biology, physics, and geography. Along with genuine subject-relevant concepts, they interjected completely made-up terms.

In one such study, approximately 90 percent of respondents claimed that they had at least some knowledge of the made-up terms. Consistent with other findings related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the more familiar participants claimed that they were with a topic, the more likely they were to also claim they were familiar with the meaningless terms.

As Dunning has suggested, the very trouble with ignorance is that it can feel just like expertise. So what explains this psychological effect? Are some people simply too dense, to be blunt, to know how dim-witted they are? Dunning and Kruger suggest that this phenomenon stems from what they refer to as a "dual burden.

Incompetent people tend to:. Dunning has pointed out that the very knowledge and skills necessary to be good at a task are the exact same qualities that a person needs to recognize that they are not good at that task. So if a person lacks those abilities, they remain not only bad at that task but ignorant to their own inability.

Dunning suggests that deficits in skill and expertise create a two-pronged problem. First, these deficits cause people to perform poorly in the domain in which they are incompetent. Secondly, their erroneous and deficient knowledge makes them unable to recognize their mistakes.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is also related to difficulties with metacognition, or the ability to step back and look at one's own behavior and abilities from outside of oneself. People are often only able to evaluate themselves from their own limited and highly subjective point of view.

From this limited perspective, they seem highly skilled, knowledgeable, and superior to others. Because of this, people sometimes struggle to have a more realistic view of their own abilities. Another contributing factor is that sometimes a tiny bit of knowledge on a subject can lead people to mistakenly believe that they know all there is to know about it. As the old saying goes, a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

A person might have the slimmest bit of awareness about a subject, yet thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, believe that he or she is an expert. Other factors that can contribute to the effect include our use of heuristics , or mental shortcuts that allow us to make decisions quickly, and our tendency to seek out patterns even where none exist.

Our minds are primed to try to make sense of the disparate array of information we deal with on a daily basis. As we try to cut through the confusion and interpret our own abilities and performance within our individual worlds, it is perhaps not surprising that we sometimes fail so completely to accurately judge how well we do. So who is affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect? Unfortunately, we all are.

This is because no matter how informed or experienced we are, everyone has areas in which they are uninformed and incompetent. They asked professional comedians to rate 30 jokes for funniness. Then, 65 undergraduates were asked to rate the jokes too, and then ranked according to how well their judgements matched those of the professionals.

They were also asked how well they thought they had done compared to the average person. As you might expect, most people thought their ability to tell what was funny was above average. The results were, however, most interesting when split according to how well participants performed.

Those slightly above average in their ability to rate jokes were highly accurate in their self-assessment, while those who actually did the best tended to think they were only slightly above average. Participants who were least able to judge what was funny at least according to the professional comics were also least able to accurately assess their own ability. This finding was not a quirk of trying to measure subjective sense of humour.

The researchers repeated the experiment, only this time with tests of logical reasoning and grammar. These disciplines have defined answers, and in each case they found the same pattern: those people who performed the worst were also the worst in estimating their own aptitude. In all three studies, those whose performance put them in the lowest quarter massively overestimated their own abilities by rating themselves as above average. In a later study, the most incompetent participants still failed to realise they were bottom of the pack even when given feedback on the performance of others.

Kruger and Dunning's interpretation is that accurately assessing skill level relies on some of the same core abilities as actually performing that skill, so the least competent suffer a double deficit.