For the John Templeton Foundation, I wrote about the dynamics of overconfidence and self-awareness.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger are among the few contemporary psychologists whose last names have escaped into the popular consciousness in adjectival form. Their 1999 article “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” codified what is now known as the Dunning–Kruger effect, a handy shorthand for the rationale (or lack of such) behind all kinds of hubristic human foolishness. Journalists now write about Dunning-Kruger economics, Dunning–Kruger geopolitics, a Dunning–Kruger presidency. When someone, somewhere, does something especially stupid, David Dunning is often the person the reporter calls for a comment.
But are unskilled people disproportionately prone to be unaware of what they don’t know? In a newly published study by Yuhan Han and Dunning, a series of experiments were conducted to explore how experts in climate science, psychological statistics, and investment think about the limits of their own expertise. They did this by measuring experts’ and non-experts’ metaknowledge (knowledge about what they do or don’t know) by quizzing them and recording not only their answers but also their perceived degree of confidence in each answer.