People who know the least about a subject often feel the most confident about it.
In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger found that the lowest-scoring participants in tests of logic, grammar and humour rated their own performance far above average. Top performers, meanwhile, tended to underestimate themselves.
Why is this true?
The skills needed to do a task well are often the same skills needed to judge how well you did it. The effect is smaller than pop culture suggests, and it says nothing about intelligence, only about self-assessment in a specific skill.
More facts in this category
More about psychology
Psychology facts describe the shortcuts your mind takes without asking permission. We misjudge randomness, remember interrupted tasks better than finished ones, and change our answers when a group disagrees with us. The entries here stick to findings that have held up under replication, avoid the pop-science versions that overstate them, and explain what the effect really predicts about everyday behaviour.