I can do that, too!
I can do that, too!
April 27, 2009 by Taylor Studios
Have you ever had a conversation with someone who is strangely insistent about a particular viewpoint despite the fact that they have a limited amount of real knowledge on the subject – if any at all? Enter Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both of Cornell University. The pair must have also taken note of this curious phenomenon and in 1999 published findings in support of what’s been coined the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The Dunning-Kruger effect supports Charles Darwin’s assessment that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
To prove their point, Kruger and Dunning tested groups of undergraduate students who first evaluated how well they believed they would score in the areas of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. It was found that while the competent students underestimated their skills, those who tested poorly had grossly overestimated. Furthermore, after being shown their test scores, those who had scored well estimated accurately while those in the bottom percentiles still overestimated.
I was tickled to run across this bit of information a few months ago as I myself had noticed this very occurrence when speaking with people about studying language. As a Spanish major who after years of study still struggled to communicate during a year abroad, I’ve always found the claim of people who say they can speak a foreign language after a couple of years of high school courses suspect.
At Taylor Studios we design and fabricate all sorts of random and interesting things. Yet even after being geared with my new found knowledge of the Dunning-Kruger effect it was just the other day that I was thinking I bet I could carve a dinosaur. I’ve seen it done once.
Posted by: Renee