Debunking the Dunning-Kruger effect – the least skilled people know how much they don't know, but everyone thinks they are better than average
Dunning and Kruger have also shown that incompetent people can be taught to raise their competence by learning the skills to judge their own performance more accurately, in short, to make their metacognition more accurate.
Henry L. Roediger III • Make It Stick
This phenomenon, of particular interest for metacognition, has been named the Dunning-Kruger effect after the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Their research showed that incompetent people overestimate their own competence and, failing to sense a mismatch between their performance and what is desirable, see no need to try to improve.
Henry L. Roediger III • Make It Stick
Dunning-Kruger Effect : Knowing the limits of your intelligence requires a certain level of intelligence, so some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are.
Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas
Poor students lack insight into their own limitations – as they would have to know about the vast amount of knowledge out there to be able to see how little they know in comparison.
Sönke Ahrens • How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers
“You may have heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is that incompetent people don’t have the skills to recognize their own incompetence.”, writes David Brooks, NYT, Jan 30, 2025: “The 6 Rules Of Stupidity”
The upshot is that people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well.