Interesting "Laws"

[Beest]

Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.[1]

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.

Dumb people who know a little, think they are experts and are certain they are right, experts who know a lot realise how much they don't know and are less sure.

Studies on the Dunning–Kruger effect tend to focus on American test subjects. Similar studies on European subjects show marked muting of the effect[citation needed]; studies on some East Asian subjects suggest that something like the opposite of the Dunning–Kruger effect operates on self-assessment and motivation to improve: