For Researchers

On this page, you’ll find peer-reviewed papers that cite the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Papers with an asterisk (*) indicate that they require journal access to view and may be behind a pay wall.

Key Papers

Original Paper:

Kruger, J. M., & Dunning, D.  (1999).  Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121-1134.*

  • People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
Reviews:

Dunning, D.  (2011). The Dunning-Kruger effect:  On being ignorant of one’s own ignorance.  In J. Olson & M. P. Zanna (Eds.), Advances in experimental social psychology (vol. 44, pp. 247-296).  New York: Elsevier.

  • In this chapter, I provide argument and evidence that the scope of people’s ignorance is often invisible to them. This meta-ignorance (or ignorance of ignorance) arises because lack of expertise and knowledge often hides in the realm of the “unknown unknowns” or is disguised by erroneous beliefs and background knowledge that only appear to be sufficient to conclude a right answer. 

Dunning, D., Johnson, K., Ehrlinger, J., & Kruger, J. (2003). Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12(3), 83–87.

  • People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.
Underlying Mechanisms:

Ehrlinger, J., Johnson, K., Banner, M., Dunning, D., & Kruger, J.  (2008).  Why the unskilled are unaware?  Further explorations of (lack of) self-insight among the incompetent.  Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 105, 98-121.

  • People are typically overly optimistic when evaluating the quality of their performance on social and intellectual tasks. In particular, poor performers grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits. Five studies demonstrated that poor performers lack insight into their shortcomings even in real world settings and when given incentives to be accurate.

Ehrlinger, J., & Dunning, D. (2003). How chronic self-views influence (and potentially mislead) estimates of performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84(1), 5–17.

  • In support of this observation, manipulating people’s general views of their ability, or altering which view seemed most relevant to a task, changed performance estimates independently of any impact on actual performance. A final study extended this analysis to why women disproportionately avoid careers in science.

Sheldon, O., Dunning, D., & Ames, D. R. (2014).  Emotionally unskilled, unaware, and uninterested in learning more:  Biased self-assessments of emotional intelligence. Journal of Applied Psychology, 99, 125-137.

  • Despite the importance of self-awareness for managerial success, many organizational members hold overly optimistic views of their expertise and performance—a phenomenon particularly prevalent among those least skilled in a given domain. We examined whether this same pattern extends to appraisals of emotional intelligence (EI), a critical managerial competency. We also examined why this overoptimism tends to survive explicit feedback about performance.

Sanchez, C., & Dunning, D.  (2018). Overconfidence among beginners:  Is a little learning a dangerous thing? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 114(1), 10-28.

  • Across 6 studies we investigated the development of overconfidence among beginners. Although beginners did not start out overconfident in their judgments, they rapidly surged to a “beginner’s bubble” of overconfidence. This bubble was traced to exuberant and error-filled theorizing about how to approach the task formed after just a few learning experiences. 

Caputo, D. D., & Dunning, D.  (2005). What you don’t know:  The role played by errors of omission in imperfect self-assessments. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 488-505.

  • Perceptions of ability often bear little relationship to objective performance. We suggest that people fail to judge their ability more accurately because they have little or no insight into their errors of omission (i.e., solutions they could have generated to problems but missed), although they can be perfectly aware of solutions found.

Williams, E. F., Dunning, D., & Kruger, J.  (2013).  The hobgoblin of consistency:  Algorithmic judgment strategies underlie inflated self-assessments of performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 104, 976-994.

  • People often hold inflated views of their performance on intellectual tasks, with poor performers exhibiting the most inflation. What leads to such excessive confidence? We suggest that the more people approach such tasks in a “rational” (i.e., consistent, algorithmic) manner, relative to those who use more variable or ad hoc approaches, the more confident they become, irrespective of whether they are reaching correct judgments.

Jansen, R.A., Rafferty, A.N. & Griffiths, T.L. (2021). A rational model of the Dunning–Kruger effect supports insensitivity to evidence in low performers. Nat Hum Behav, 5, 756–763.

  • To disentangle these explanations, we conducted a large-scale replication of a seminal paper with approximately 4,000 participants in each of two studies. Comparing the predictions of two variants of our rational model provides support for low performers being less able to estimate whether they are correct in the domains of grammar and logical reasoning.

Critiques of the Dunning-Kruger Effect and Responses

Feld, J., Sauermann, J., & de Grip, A. (2017). Estimating the relationship between skill and overconfidence. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 68, 18-24.

  • Our results show that the unskilled are more overconfident than the skilled. However, as we predict in our methodological discussion, this relationship is significantly weaker than ordinary least squares estimates su

Krajc, M., & Ortmann, A. (2008). Are the unskilled really that unaware? An alternative explanation. Journal of Economic Psychology, 29(5), 724–738.

  • In a series of articles and manuscripts (e.g., [Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessment. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 1121–1134; Dunning, D., Johnson, K., Ehrlinger, J., & Kruger, J. (2003). Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 12, 83–87; Ehrlinger, J., Johnson, K., Banner, M., Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (2008). Why the unskilled are unaware: Further exploration of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 105, 98–121.]), Dunning, Kruger and their collaborators argued that the unskilled lack the metacognitive ability to realize their incompetence. We propose that the alleged unskilled-and-unaware problem – rather than being one of biased judgements – is a signal extraction problem that differs for the skilled and the unskilled. Specifically, the unskilled face a tougher inference problem than the skilled.

 Krueger, J., & Mueller, R. A. (2002). Unskilled, unaware, or both? The better-than-average heuristic and statistical regression predict errors in estimates of own performance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(2), 180–188.

  • People who score low on a performance test overestimate their own performance relative to others, whereas high scorers slightly underestimate their own performance. J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999) attributed these asymmetric errors to differences in metacognitive skill. A replication study showed no evidence for mediation effects for any of several candidate variables.

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (2002). Unskilled and unaware–but why? A reply to Krueger and Mueller. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(2), 189–192.

  •  J. Krueger and R. A. Mueller (2002) replicated these basic findings but interpreted them differently. They concluded that a combination of the better-than-average (BTA) effect and a regression artifact better explains why the unskilled are unaware. The authors of the present article respectfully disagree with this proposal and suggest that any interpretation of J. Krueger and R. A. Mueller’s results is hampered because those authors used unreliable tests and inappropriate measures of relevant mediating variables.

McIntosh, R. D., & Della Sala, S. (2022). The persistent irony of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The Psychologist.

  • At the same time, in the academic literature, it has been suggested that the signature pattern of the DKE (Figure 1A) might be nothing more than a statistical artefact. In a typical study, people’s tendencies to under- or overestimation are analysed as a function of their ability for the task. This involves a ‘double dipping’ into the data because the task performance score is used once to rank people for ability, and then again to determine whether the self-estimate is an under- or over-estimate. This dubious double-dipping makes the analysis prone to a slippery statistical phenomenon called ‘regression to thee mean’.

Schlösser, T., Dunning, D., Johnson, K. L., & Kruger, J. (2013). How unaware are the unskilled? Empirical tests of the “signal extraction” counterexplanation for the Dunning–Kruger effect in self-evaluation of performance. Journal of Economic Psychology, 39, 85–100.

  • Previous work on the Dunning–Kruger effect has shown that poor performers often show little insight into the shortcomings in their performance, presumably because they suffer a double curse. Deficits in their knowledge prevent them from both producing correct responses and recognizing that the responses they produce are inferior to those produced by others. Krajč and Ortmann (2008) offered a different account, suggesting instead that poor performers make performance estimates with no more error than top performers. Floor effects, coupled with the assumption of a backwards-J performance distribution, force their self-evaluations errors to be frequently positive in nature. Krajč and Ortmann, however, offered no empirical data to test their “signal extraction” account. In three studies, we assessed their theoretical model by examining whether (1) the data producing the Dunning–Kruger effect fit the statistical assumptions considered by Krajč and Ortmann necessary to produce it, and (2) to see if their framework reproduced Dunning–Kruger errors in a data set that fit their statistical assumptions. We found that the Krajč–Ortmann framework failed to anticipate self-evaluative misperceptions on the part of poor performers, but that it does much better at accounting for misperceptions among top performers. Paradoxically, the model suggests that Kruger and Dunning (1999) may have underestimated the accuracy of top performers, even though their account asserts such accuracy.

Dunning, D. (2022). The Dunning-Kruger effect and its discontents. The Psychologist.

  • In a recent Psychologist article (March issue), Robert D. McIntosh and Sergio Della Sala reviewed research arguing that the Dunning-Kruger effect has no real existence but is a mere statistical artefact. However, their discussion of the effect focuses on a slim sliver of work amid 20 years and more of active and varied research on the topic (for an ageing review discussing possible statistical artefacts, see Dunning, 2011). They also oddly ignore scholarship that directly contradicts their assertions.

Related Phenomena

Hypocognition

Illusion of Explanatory Depth

Overclaiming

Psychology

Jansen, R.A., Rafferty, A.N. & Griffiths, T.L. (2021). A rational model of the Dunning–Kruger effect supports insensitivity to evidence in low performers. Nat Hum Behav, 5, 756–763.

  • To disentangle these explanations, we conducted a large-scale replication of a seminal paper with approximately 4,000 participants in each of two studies. Comparing the predictions of two variants of our rational model provides support for low performers being less able to estimate whether they are correct in the domains of grammar and logical reasoning.

Muller, A., Sirianni, L. A., & Addante, R. J. (2021). Neural correlates of the Dunning-Kruger effect. European Journal of Neuroscience, 53(2), 460-484.

  • Findings suggest over- and under-estimators use differing cognitive processes when assessing their performance, such that under-estimators may rely on recollection during memory while over-estimators may draw upon excess familiarity when over-estimating their performance. Episodic memory thus appears to play a contributory role in metacognitive judgements of illusory superiority.

Zhou, X., & Jenkins, R. (2020).  Dunning-Kruger effects in face perception. Cognition, 203, 104345.

  • To test this possibility, we assessed participants’ insight into their own face perception abilities (self-estimates) and those of other people (peer estimates). We found classic Dunning–Kruger Effects in matching tasks for unfamiliar identity, familiar identity, gaze direction, and emotional expression.

West, K., & Eaton, A. A. (2019). Prejudiced and unaware of it: Evidence for the Dunning-Kruger model in the domains of racism and sexism. Personality and Individual Differences, 146(1), 111-119.

  • In line with the Dunning-Kruger model, participants overestimated their levels of racial and gender-based egalitarianism, and this pattern was strongest among the most prejudiced participants.

Pennycook, G., Ross, R. M., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2017). Dunning-Kruger effects in reasoning: Theoretical implications of the failure to recognize incompetence. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(6), 1774-1784.

  • Our results provide evidence for Dunning–Kruger effects both in estimated performance on the CRT and in self-reported analytic-thinking disposition. These findings indicate that part of the reason why people are biased is that they are either unaware of or indifferent to their own bias.

Mata, A., Ferreira, M. B., & Sherman, S. J. (2013). The metacognitive advantage of deliberative thinkers: A dual-process perspective on overconfidence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(3), 353–373.

  • Deliberative thinkers are aware of both the deliberative solution and the intuitive alternative; realizing that the deliberative solution is better, they are likely to feel more confident and be more accurate in how they assess their performance and that of others. Intuitive thinkers, on the other hand, are aware only of the intuitive solution; whenever this solution is incorrect, they are unaware of how poor their performance was and how they rank in comparison to others.

Engeler, I., & Häubl, G. (2021). Miscalibration in predicting one’s performance: Disentangling misplacement and misestimation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 120(4), 940–955.*

  • When people predict their performance, they can be miscalibrated in two ways—they may mispredict how they will perform relative to others (misplacement) and how they will perform in absolute terms (misestimation). Prior work has yielded contradictory conclusions about the relative direction of these two types of miscalibration. Some research found that they occur in opposite directions—that is, that people who believe they are better than average (BTA) tend to underestimate their absolute performance, whereas those who believe they are worse than average (WTA) tend to overestimate their performance. Other studies found that the two types of miscalibration occur in the same direction—that is, that people with BTA beliefs tend to overestimate their performance. We reconcile these apparently conflicting findings by disentangling placement beliefs that are correct from those that are erroneous and focusing on the latter as only these represent instances of misplacement. Two field studies reveal a key asymmetry—erroneous BTA beliefs are primarily driven by misestimation of one’s own absolute performance, whereas erroneous WTA beliefs tend to be driven by misestimation of others’ absolute performance. A reexamination of data from Moore and Small (2007) supports this insight about the sources of misplacement beliefs. The findings suggest that the conflicting conclusions from prior work might have been attributable to differences in the extent to which results were based on observations with erroneous (as opposed to correct) placement beliefs. This research provides novel insights into the psychology of miscalibration in performance predictions and helps unify seemingly contradictory prior findings.

Political Science

Lyons, B. A. , Montgomery, J. M. , Guess, A. M. , Nyhan, B. , Reifler, J. (2021). Overconfidence in news judgments is associated with false news susceptibility. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences – PNAS, 118(23), 1-10.

  • We show that overconfident individuals are more likely to visit untrustworthy websites in behavioral data; to fail to successfully distinguish between true and false claims about current events in survey questions; and to report greater willingness to like or share false content on social media, especially when it is politically congenial. In all, these results paint a worrying picture: The individuals who are least equipped to identify false news content are also the least aware of their own limitations and, therefore, more susceptible to believing it and spreading it further.

Motta, M., Callaghan, T., & Sylvester, S. (2018). Knowing less but presuming more: Dunning-Kruger effects and the endorsement of anti-vaccine policy attitudes. Social Science & Medicine, 211(C), 274-281. *

  • More than a third of respondents in our sample thought that they knew as much or more than doctors (36%) and scientists (34%) about the causes of autism. Our analysis indicates that this overconfidence is highest among those with low levels of knowledge about the causes of autism and those with high levels of misinformation endorsement.

Economics

Balasubramnian, B., & Sargeant, C. S. (2020). Impact of inflated perceptions of financial literacy on financial decision making. Journal of Economic Psychology, 80, 102306. *

  • Those with inflated perceptions of financial literacy are more likely to miss mortgage payments, receive a collection call, use informal debt, and have poor banking behavior. Those without blind spots make better financial decisions. The differences between those with and without blind spots are more pronounced among individuals with higher education and income.

Feld, J., Sauermann, J., & de Grip, A. (2017). Estimating the relationship between skill and overconfidence. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 68, 18-24.

  • Our results show that the unskilled are more overconfident than the skilled. However, as we predict in our methodological discussion, this relationship is significantly weaker than ordinary least squares estimates suggest.

Gregoire, P. (2016). Unskilled traders, overconfidence and information acquisition. Journal of Behavioral Experimental Finance, 9, 1-5.

  • The value of an asset has two components, referred to as obvious and obscure. Unskilled traders are only aware of the obvious component and thus overestimate the precision of the information they may acquire. 

Park, Y. J., & Santos-Pinto, L. (2010). Overconfidence in tournaments: Evidence from the field. Theory & Decision, 69, 143-166.

  • We find support for the “unskilled and unaware hypothesis” in chess: high-skilled chess players make better forecasts than low-skilled chess players.

Education

Feld, J., Sauermann, J., & de Grip, A. (2017). Estimating the relationship between skill and overconfidence. Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 68, 18-24.

  • Our results show that the unskilled are more overconfident than the skilled. However, as we predict in our methodological discussion, this relationship is significantly weaker than ordinary least squares estimates sug

Sawler, J. (2021). Economics 101-ism and the Dunning-Kruger effect: Reducing overconfidence among introductory macroeconomics students. International Review of Economics Education, 36, 100208. *

  • This article describes an experiment designed to determine whether including readings and discussions around economic complexity reduces overconfidence among introductory macroeconomics students. The results suggest that the Dunning-Kruger effect is present among introductory economics students, and that the level of overconfidence is significantly reduced by the introduction of such readings and discussions.

Casselman, B. L., & Atwood, C. H. (2017). Improving general chemistry course performance through online homework-based metacognitive training. Journal of Chemical Education, 94(12), 1811-1821. *

  • After factoring out the effect of teacher differences, metacognitive training improved student ACS final exam average performance by approximately 4% when compared to the control section. Additionally, metacognitive training targeted the bottom quartile of the course by improving their ACS final exam average performance by approximately 10% when compared to the control section.

Lindsey, B. A., & Nagel, M. L. (2015). Do students know what they know? Exploring the accuracy of students’ self-assessments. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 11(2), 020103.

  • An examination of the data at the level of students’ overall scores reveals results consistent with the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which low-performing students tend to overestimate their abilities, while high-performing students estimate their abilities more accurately. Similar results have been widely reported in the science education literature.

Pavel, S. R., Robertson, M. F., & Harrison, B. T. (2012). The Dunning-Kruger effect in SIUC University’s aviation students. Journal of Aviation Technology and Engineering, 2(1), 125-129.

  • Results indicate that the Dunning-Kruger effect is present in SIUC aviation students. Students scoring lower on both a grammar testand a pilot knowledge test grossly overestimated their ability, while higher scoring students underestimated their ability.  …  However, this study indicates that the Dunning-Kruger effect might be a problem within the aviation industry and could play a role in the safety of the National Airspace System.

Medicine

Haddad, N., Tsur, A. M., Nadler, R., Glassberg, E., Benov, A., & Chen, J. (2021). Inexperienced but confident: A survey of advanced life support providers and life-saving interventions in the Israel Defence Forces. Military Medicine, 186(S1), 261-265.

  • IDF ALS providers have alarmingly limited experience in performing LSIs. Many of them are confident in their ability despite not achieving evidence-based benchmarks. Additional training is required, maybe as a part of an annual medical fitness test.

Ahmed, O., & Walsh, T. N. (2020). Surgical trainee experience with open cholecystectomy and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Journal of Surgical Education, 77(5), 1076-1081. *

  • This study confirms a steep decline in training opportunities in open cholecystectomy, but also raises concern about a Dunning-Kruger effect as, despite this lack of experience, the majority felt “somewhat comfortable” or “very comfortable” in converting to open surgery. The study shows that neither employers nor employees currently enough of an appreciation of a domain to understand its extent and how misinterpreting skill level can pose challenges to both groups.

Borracci, R. A., & Arribalzaga, E. B. (2018). The incidence of overconfidence and underconfidence effects in medical student examinations. Journal of Surgical Education, 75(5), 1223-1229.

  • The small proportion of our students exhibiting overconfidence or underconfidence behaviors moderates the need for educational interventions. Nevertheless, promoting prudence in individualized students manifesting overconfidence, and trust in those reporting significant underconfidence could increase the reliability of medical judgment during their future professional life.

Deborah Kwolek, Maintenance of Certification (MOC) Update and ABIM [American Board of Internal Medicine] Summit Report, 11/2018

  • At the outset of his presentation entitled “Why Incompetence Fails to Recognize Itself,” Dr. Dunning asked the physicians in the room to think about their communities, and whether they know clinicians to whom they would not send their family. …Dr. Graham McMahon, president and CEO of the Accreditation Council on Continuing Medical Education, built on Dr. Dunning’s data discussion by encouraging the audience to think about how continuing education models should be designed to spark engagement, improvement, and change…At the conclusion of the Summit, Dr. Patricia Conolly, secretary of the ABIM Board of Directors, opined, “Underneath is the reality that no one is very good at self-assessment, which won’t serve our patients in the way they should be served. As medicine changes and we adapt, unlearning the old is very much a part of keeping up, and that needs to be rolled into how we stay current.”

Ian Scott, Errors in clinical reasoning: Causes and remedial strategies. BMJ, 1/4/2009 *

  • They have described how incompetence (metacognitive defects) lead to dramatic over-estimation of one’s own abilities and performance, and an inflated self-assessment. And how such people are also less able to recognise and rate genuine levels of competence accurately in either themselves or in (objectively) more competent peers. … However, such metacognitive deficits can be improved, and skills (and insight) gained by actually gaining competence at the particular task or skill in question.

Langendyk, V. (2006). Not knowing that they do not know: Self-assessment accuracy of third-year medical students. Medical Education, 40(2), 173-179. *

  • In the 3rd year of the programme low-achieving students are unable to assess accurately the quality of their own work or the work of their peers in a formative written assessment. The PBL curriculum does not guarantee the appropriate development of self-assessment skills.

Edwards, R. K., Kellner, K. R., Sistrom, C. L., & Magyari, E. J. (2003). Medical student self-assessment of performance on an obstetrics and gynecology clerkship. American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 188(4), 1078-1082. *

  • From June 1990 to July 2000, 1152 students predicted examination and clerkship grades at the beginning and end of their obstetrics and gynecology clerkship. … Students with higher grades tended to underestimate their performance; the students who received lower grades tended to overestimate their performance. All factors had a significant effect on the outcome (all, P<.001). Odds ratios for the overestimation were greatest for the lower one third of the class compared with the upper one third of the class (odds ratio, 4.38) 

Hodges, B., Regehr, G., & Martin, D. (2001). Difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence. Academic Medicine, 76(10), 587-589.

  • Having reviewed the work of Kruger and Dunning, we decided to see whether it was indeed the lowest performers in our group who were most inaccurate in their self-assessments. We also wondered whether those in the highest-performing group would underestimate their skills but recalibrate following exposure to the performance of others. With these questions in mind, we reanalyzed the study data following the method of Kruger and Dunning and, indeed, both of these findings were confirmed.

Computer Science

Gibbs, S., Moore, K., Steel, G., & McKinnon, A. (2017). The Dunning-Kruger effect in a workplace computing setting. Computers in Human Behavior, 72,589-595. *

  • The study shows that neither employers nor employees currently enough of an appreciation of a domain to understand its extent and how misinterpreting skill level can pose challenges to both groups.

Philosophy

Ballantyne, N. (2018). Epistemic trespassing. Mind, 128, 367-398.

  • For trespassers, their incompetence is for them an ‘unknown unknown’, as former U.S. Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld might put it. Self-ignorance about trespassing is dangerous. Sometimes trespassers will have enough knowledge to give them false confidence that they are not trespassers but not enough knowledge to avoid trespassing.

Wiland, E. (2016). Peer disagreement and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Episteme, 14, 481-498. *

  • A central question in that debate concerns peer disagreement: When I am confronted with an epistemic peer with whom I disagree, how should my confidence in my beliefs change (if at all)?