Someone Over-rating his own skills! Sounds Familiar?

Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Dunning–Kruger effect:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.

The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.

This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people.

It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. “Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”

(“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”)

(“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”

ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

  1. Tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
  2. Fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
  3. Fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
  4. Recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

My own thoughts:

When I first Read about this, my first impressions were :

  • Do they actually have a name for that ?!
  • This sounds very familiar.
  • I knew it !

this explains the physical relation between Knowledge, Power and Money somehow.

More Knowledge = Less Confidence

I knew this was was true, but never thought how to prove it. (I guess thats what PhD’s are for).

This explains a lot of people I met in my career life.

As for myself: I prefer to have less confidence rather than to be an self-overrating-wan-a-be.

  • By Shyam, September 23, 2010 @ 08:49

    Nice one indicating and reflecting the true side of the comp where you are and ( we worked) 🙂

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