There are many incompetent people in the world.
Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear that he
might be one of them.
Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell,
worries about this because, according to his
research, most incompetent people do not know
that they are incompetent.
On the contrary. People who do things badly,
Dunning has found in studies conducted with a
graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually
supremely confident of their abilities -- more
confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
``I began to think that there were probably lots of
things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it,''
Dunning said.
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the
blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is
that the skills required for competence often are the
same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they
suggested in a paper appearing in the December
issue of the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.
``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and
make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence
robs them of the ability to realize it,'' wrote Kruger,
now an assistant professor at the University of
Illinois, and Dunning.
This deficiency in ``self-monitoring skills,'' the
researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the
humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are
not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the
market -- and repeatedly lose out -- and of the
politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner
parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.
In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested
their theory of incompetence. They found that
subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests
of logic, English grammar and humor were also the
most likely to ``grossly overestimate'' how well they
had performed.
In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability
were positively linked to their actual scores. But the
lowest-ranked participants showed much greater
distortions in their self-estimates.
Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of
logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored
only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had
scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their
overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th
percentile.
Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile
on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th
percentile in the ability to ``identify grammatically
correct standard English,'' and estimated their test
scores to be at the 61st percentile.
On the humor test, in which participants were asked
to rate jokes according to their funniness (subjects'
ratings were matched against those of an ``expert''
panel of professional comedians), low-scoring
subjects were also more apt to have an inflated
perception of their skill. But because humor is
idiosyncratically defined, the researchers said, the
results were less conclusive.
Unlike unskilled counterparts, the most able
subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found,
were likely to underestimate their competence. The
researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the
absence of information about how others were
doing, highly competent subjects assumed that
others were performing as well as they were -- a
phenomenon psychologists term the ``false
consensus effect.''
When high-scoring subjects were asked to ``grade''
the grammar tests of their peers, however, they
quickly revised their evaluations of their own
performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of
those who scored badly themselves were unaffected
by the experience of grading others; some subjects
even further inflated their estimates of their own
abilities.
``Incompetent individuals were less able to
recognize competence in others,'' the researchers
concluded.
In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to
discover if training would help modify the
exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects.
In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning
did improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to
assess their performance realistically, they found.
The findings, the psychologists said, support
Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ``he who knows
best knows how little he knows.''
And the research meshes neatly with other work
indicating that overconfidence is common; studies
have found, for example, that the vast majority of
people rate themselves as ``above average'' on a
wide array of abilities -- though such an abundance
of talent would be impossible in statistical terms.
This overestimation, studies indicate, is more likely
for tasks that are difficult than for those that are
easy.
Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C.
Funder, a psychology professor at the University of
California at Riverside, for example, said he
suspects that most lay people have only a vague
idea of the meaning of ``average'' in statistical terms.
``I'm not sure the average person thinks of `average'
or `percentile' in quite that literal a sense,'' Funder
said, ``so `above average' might mean to them
`pretty good,' or `OK,' or `doing all right.' And if, in
fact, people mean something subjective when they
use the word, then it's really hard to evaluate
whether they're right or wrong, using the statistical
criterion.''
But Dunning said his current research and past
studies indicated there are many reasons why
people would tend to overestimate their
competency and not be aware of it.
In various situations, feedback is absent, or at least
ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is
likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with
incompetence, social norms prevent most people
from blurting out ``You stink!'' -- truthful though this
assessment may be.
=A92000 San Francisco Chronicle Page A1
