And I will break the pride of your power.... Leviticus 26:19
".....a psychologist, Andrew Danvers, who debunked the Dunning-Kruger
Effect as bad science. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is frequently touted as
a meme in social media to shame people. The effect can be stated
various ways:
- The least competent people are the most proud of their knowledge or ability.
- Confidence in a subject is inversely proportional to knowledge about it.
- If you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know you are really, really stupid.
You get the idea; “dumb people are clueless but proud of their
ignorance.” That’s the psychological “law” David Dunning and Justin
Kruger supposedly established in the 1990s.
Danvers showed that it was bad science, and an illustration of the
“replication crisis” in psychology. Now, a mathematician from Bowdoin
College in Brunswick, Maine, shows that it is bad mathematics, too.
Dunning and Kruger were the clueless ones.
Debunking the
Dunning-Kruger effect – the least skilled people know how much they
don’t know, but everyone thinks they are better than average (The Conversation,
8 May 2023). Eric C. Gaze, a mathematics professor at Bowdoin, confirms
one part of the story: like the folks in Lake Wobegon where “all the
children are above average,” most people rate themselves better than
average, which is mathematically absurd.
So yes, pride is a common human
foible. In general, “overestimation is pervasive across many skills –
including logic tests,” he says. “But it is mathematically impossible
for most people to be better than average at a certain task.”
Most importantly, the key claim of the Dunning-Kruger Effect—the
notion that people are clueless about their ignorance—came from a flawed
use of statistics. The mathematician gives three reasons for the error:
- Those with the worst test scores rated themselves more highly in D-K’s experiment because they were farthest from a perfect score; this is a logical truism, not a finding.
- Since everyone assumes they are better than average, it is not surprising that the least skilled also did.
- Those with the lowest scores did not overestimate their ability on the specific test.
Conclusions
The upshot is that this widely popular meme is unsupportable scientifically and mathematically.
The original paper by Dunning and Kruger starts with the quote: “It is one of the essential features of incompetence that the person so inflicted is incapable of knowing that they are incompetent.” This idea has spread far and wide through both scientific literature and pop culture alike. But according to the work of my colleagues and me, the reality is that very few people are truly unskilled and unaware.
What is the take-away lesson from these debunkings of fake science?
Ironically, it’s those who repeat the Dunning-Kruger effect to shame people who are the least competent to judge its truth. “To claim otherwise suggests, incorrectly, that much of the population is hopelessly ignorant.”
Ironically, it’s those who repeat the Dunning-Kruger effect to shame people who are the least competent to judge its truth. “To claim otherwise suggests, incorrectly, that much of the population is hopelessly ignorant.”
Over the
years, we have seen this Dunning-Kruger meme thrown at us on Twitter by
atheists who claim “You just don’t understand evolution” or “You don’t
understand science.” Those same people often did not read the article
they criticize, displaying their own ignorance.
Incompetence
and arrogance are not the sole domain of ignorant people.
Have you had anyone repeat the Dunning-Kruger Effect?" CEH