This is a central flaw in the character of Donald J. Trump
In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger
effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task
overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory
superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of
ability. Without
the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their
competence or incompetence.
As described by social psychologists David Dunning snd Justin
Kruger, the bias results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and
from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "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." Colloquially, people experiencing this bias are said to be at the top of
"Mount Stupid," although
this is not used in scientific articles about the Dunning-Kruger effect
Original Study
The psychological phenomenon of illusory
superiority was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's
1999 study, "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing
One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". The
identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of
McArthur Wheeler, who, on April 19, 1995, robbed two banks while his face was
covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the
surveillance cameras. This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the
chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink.
Other investigations of the phenomenon,
such as "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003),
indicate that much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the
person's ignorance of a given activity's standards of performance. Dunning and
Kruger's research also indicates that training in a task, such as solving a
logic puzzle, increases people's ability to accurately evaluate how good they
are at it.
In Self-insight: Roadblocks and
Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (2005), Dunning described the
Dunning–Kruger effect as "the anosognosia of everyday life",
referring to a neurological condition in which a disabled person either denies
or seems unaware of his or her disability. He stated: "If you're
incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to
produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a
right answer is."
In 2011, Dunning wrote about his
observations that people with substantial, measurable deficits in their
knowledge or expertise lack the ability to recognize those deficits and,
therefore, despite potentially making error after error, tend to think they are
performing competently when they are not: "In short, those who are
incompetent, for lack of a better term, should have little insight into their
incompetence—an assertion that has come to be known as the Dunning–Kruger
effect". In 2014, Dunning and
Helzer described how the Dunning–Kruger effect "suggests that poor performers are
not in a position to recognize the shortcomings in their performance."
Later Studies
Dunning and Kruger tested the hypotheses
of the cognitive bias of illusory superiority on undergraduate students of
introductory courses in psychology by examining the students' self-assessments
of their intellectual skills in logical reasoning (inductive, deductive, abductive),
English grammar, and personal sense of humor. After learning their
self-assessment scores, the students were asked to estimate their ranks in the
psychology class. The competent students underestimated their class rank, and
the incompetent students overestimated theirs, but the incompetent students did
not estimate their class rank as higher than the ranks estimated by the
competent group. Across four studies, the research indicated that the study
participants who scored in the bottom quartile on tests of their sense of
humor, knowledge of grammar, and logical reasoning, overestimated their test
performance and their abilities; despite test scores that placed them in the
12th percentile, the participants estimated they ranked in the 62nd percentile.
Moreover, competent students tended to
underestimate their own competence, because they erroneously presumed that
tasks easy for them to perform were also easy for other people to perform.
Incompetent students improved their ability to estimate their class rank
correctly after receiving minimal tutoring in the skills they previously
lacked, regardless of any objective improvement gained in said skills of
perception. The study "Mind-Reading and Metacognition: Narcissism, not
Actual Competence, Predicts Self-estimated Ability" (2004) extended the
cognitive-bias premise of illusory superiority to test subjects' emotional
sensitivity toward other people and their own perceptions of other people.
The study "How Chronic Self-Views
Influence (and Potentially Mislead) Estimates of Performance" (2003)
indicated a shift in the participants' view of themselves when influenced by
external cues. The participants' knowledge of geography was tested; some tests
were intended to affect the participants' self-view positively and some were
intended to affect it negatively. The participants then were asked to rate
their performances; the participants given tests with a positive intent
reported better performance than did the participants given tests with a
negative intent.
To test Dunning and Kruger's hypotheses,
"that people, at all performance levels, are equally poor at estimating
their relative performance", the study "Skilled or Unskilled, but
Still Unaware of It: How Perceptions of Difficulty Drive Miscalibration in
Relative Comparisons" (2006) investigated three studies that manipulated
the "perceived difficulty of the tasks, and, hence, [the] participants'
beliefs about their relative standing". The investigation indicated that
when the experimental subjects were presented with moderately difficult tasks,
there was little variation among the best performers and the worst performers
in their ability to predict their performance accurately. With more difficult
tasks, the best performers were less accurate in predicting their performance
than were the worst performers. Therefore, judges at all levels of skill are
subject to similar degrees of error in the performance of tasks.
In testing alternative explanations for
the cognitive bias of illusory superiority, the study "Why the Unskilled
are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self-insight Among the
Incompetent" (2008), reached the same conclusions as previous studies of
the Dunning–Kruger effect: that, in contrast to high performers, "poor
performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve."
Individuals of relatively high social class are more overconfident
than lower-class individuals.
Cultural Differences in Self-Perception
Studies of the Dunning–Kruger effect
usually have been of North Americans, but studies of Japanese people suggest
that cultural forces have a role in the occurrence of the effect. The study
"Divergent Consequences of Success and Failure in Japan and North America:
An Investigation of Self-improving Motivations and Malleable Selves"
(2001) indicated that Japanese people tended to underestimate their abilities,
and tended to see underachievement (failure) as an opportunity to improve their
abilities at a given task, thereby increasing their value to the social group.
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