Flutterby™! : Dunning on Dunning-Kruger

An expert on human blind spots gives advice on how to think — How to fight the Dunning-Kruger effect, explained by psychologist David Dunning.

The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that.

Number two is, over the years, the understanding of the effect out there in popular culture has morphed from “poor performers are way overconfident,” to “beginners are way overconfident.” We just published something within the last year where we showed that beginners don’t start out falling prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect, but they get there real quick. So they quickly come to believe they know how to handle a task when they really don’t have it yet.