The Dunning-Kruger effect explained for entrepreneurs

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Have you ever experienced someone telling you something with conviction that wasn't true at all? Did you happen to really understand the subject and the person telling you a lot less? Then this person probably suffered from the Dunning-Kruger effect. Read on if you don't want to fall into this trap!

What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitieve bias in which people believe they are smarter and more capable than they really are.

People who are incompetent in a task rate their performance higher than they actually are because they lack the metacognitive ability to see their own incompetence (Dunning & Kruger, 1999).

When you are beginning to gain knowledge and/or experience on a new subject, you do not yet know what you do not yet know about the subject. As a result, you overestimate your knowledge of the subject. Because saudi arabia mobile numbers list of accumulated self-confidence about what has been learned in a short period of time, you overestimate your level of competence and think that you already know more than is really the case. In fact, you are too ignorant to know how ignorant you are. You cannot critically analyze the extent to which your competencies are developed.

In contrast, people who are competent underestimate their own ability and think that tasks are easy for everyone when they are not.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who did not invent the effect themselves but did a lot of research on it.

How does the Dunning-Kruger effect occur?
Incompetent people tend to rate their abilities higher than competent people, because competent people, on the contrary, often underestimate themselves. In people where the Dunning-Kruger effect plays out, you also see that they do not recognize the skill or expertise in others, that they do not realize that they are falling short to a serious degree, and that only after gaining more competency skills do they recognize that they were falling short beforehand (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger & Kruger, 2003).