The Dunning-Kruger Effect

With the rise of the internet, there’s a flood of people who learn one thing, read one article, or watch one video and suddenly believe themselves to be an expert.

These armchair experts suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect. They know so little about the subject matter they aren’t even capable of understanding how little they know. They don’t possess the capacity to evaluate their own knowledge. They don’t know what they’re saying is dumb because they’re too dumb to recognize it.

The irony of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that the very people who know the least, consider themselves MORE competent because they don’t have enough knowledge to recognize their stupidity.

The comedian John Cleese summed it up perfectly. “...if you’re very very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very very stupid?”

Unless you’re an expert in a field, it’s difficult to spot when someone else gives you wrong information. You need to know enough, to be able to identify when someone else doesn’t know enough.

That puts many people into impossible situations. In a world flooded with information, how do we figure out if someone is telling us the truth, when we don’t know enough to judge?

You can learn more about the limits of your ignorance with the Illusion of Explanatory Depth. Click Here to learn four ways to avoid the Dunning-Kruger Effect Trap.

You can learn more about Dunning-Kruger effect in the following videos.