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Comment by jpatokal | Hacker News Reader

"The less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know." I think that's an exaggeration and understood by most people to be one.

What is, however, absolutely clear from the original study is that incompetent people have a highly inflated assessment on their own abilities: in all four experiments (!), the people with actual 10% abilities rated themselves at 50-70%. This is perfectly in line with eg. Urban Dictionary's definition[1]:

"A phenomenon where people with little knowledge or skill think they know more or have more skill than they do."

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning-Kruge...

[1] Chosen intentionally because this is a "popular" source, not an academic one.

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One thing about Dunning-Kruger that I've never heard mentioned is self-esteem affecting one's answer. As in, if you explicitly mark a low score for yourself you're both divulging to others and admitting to yourself that you think you're a failure in that category. So imagine you're presented with one of these forms... what incentive/preventative is given to not let your ego's self-preservation instincts kick in and put you down as "average" (50%+) for anything and everything?

Basically, I can't imagine how you'd account for the societal matter of bravado and I posit that it has an influence on the outcome of DK experiments. e.g. if you tried to account subvert bravado and had some kind of reward at the end to say "Hey, if you successfully guess your percentile for a given skill we'll give you a cookie." (which of course would incentivize you to put "0%" and intentionally bomb the test.)

Maybe you could ask participants to rank their proficiencies in a collection of skills. Then they could be tested on some or all of those skills to see if their ranking is correct.

They didn't ask people for their evaluations before the test; they asked after the test, and after it had been scored, to see where people thought their score ranked relative to the rest of the people who had taken the test.

So, people already knew how many things they had gotten right and wrong when making their judgement. They just judged that most other people had also gotten a similar number wrong.

They can't possibly know the makeup of other test takers. I could be 95th percentile of the total population but still 10th percentile in a test room.

So?

Congrats you've discovered the other half of the Dunning Krueger effect. The smartest people in the test will assume others might know more than them, because they know enough to know they aren't experts.

It doesn't matter what causes the wrong estimate. It's still someone with a lack of ability presenting himself as if he has ability, which he will also do, for the same reasons. when more is at stake.

What I think is most interesting about D-K is how it is referred to as universal, as an aspect of human psychology in general, but in fact the original studies were done in America on American college students and give quite different results when repeated in other cultures.

Do you have sources on that? If you read the article, it claimed that that might not be true.

Ah, actually, no, not beyond the one dismissed in TFA.

I'd have to modify my previous post, then: "What I think is most interesting about D-K is how it is referred to as universal, as an aspect of human psychology in general, but in fact the original studies were done in America on American college students".

As far as I can tell, TFA does not seem claim that there isn't a cultural dimension to D-K, just that we don't know what it is because no studies are cited. I would still say that it doubtful that the studies on Cornell students generalize to the entire population of the world when it comes to these things...

Do not forget that this very "self esteem" thingy is almost exclusively American. The other nations do not even think in such terms.

What does that mean?

Americans are conditioned from the early childhood to value their "self esteem". The others do not even care.

I can't even process what you're saying. What culture doesn't acknowledge self respect, and one's place in society relative to others?

Certainly there are small communities everywhere (even in America -- after all, they were prolific in America's infancy) that sought the creation of a hyper-communal and idyllic towns... but... those never scale because, well, people are selfish. But still. I just can't process what you're saying. Maybe I'm blinded by offense.

> What culture doesn't acknowledge self respect, and one's place in society relative to others?

What culture (besides the Northern Americans) would so blindly equate self respect to self esteem? The others understand better that you can respect yourself even without the overblown, unrealistic views on your own abilities and virtues.

> The others understand better that you can respect yourself even without the overblown, unrealistic views on your own abilities and virtues

I don't think self esteem means what you think it means.

> What culture doesn't acknowledge self respect

But we're talking about self-esteem, which everyone is supposed to get for free. Self-respect, like the respect of others, must be earned. Equating the two is a quintessentially modern-American mistake (I'm a modern American, and I made this mistake myself for years), and I think that's what 'sklogic calls out above.

You're saying Americans are the only people in the world who care about themselves? Other countries are full of purely rational actors who attach no emotional value to their own abilities? Have you ever met a real person outside of America?

> You're saying Americans are the only people in the world who care about themselves?

No, I'm saying that only Americans are so conditioned to value their "self esteem". There is no emphasis on this stupidity in the other cultures.

It's all about the emphasis: http://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/articles/Cai%20et%20al.%20...

Ok, only Americans have over-inflated self esteem, that's a different statement. Still wrong, but at least it's a common stereotype.

And I don't think that study supports your comment at all.

> Supporting this contention, our Chinese participants reported liking themselves every bit as much as our European American participants.

> This finding supports our claim that cultural differences in self-esteem arise from cultural differences in self-evaluations, with people from East Asian countries evaluating themselves less positively than people from Western countries.

> Thus, even though cognitive self-evaluations are lower in China than in America, they are not less predictive of global self-esteem. This finding suggests that global self-esteem is experienced similarly across dissimilar cultures

This study finds that self esteem is equally prevalent across the two cultures, and as far as I can see says nothing about how much the participants value their self esteem.

> Ok, only Americans have over-inflated self esteem,

Again. Only Americans are conditioned to value and cherish their self esteem. That was my statement.

Other cultures do not put any emphasis on self esteem (and many consider it as something shameful to even talk about it).

Fine, I would be interested to see evidence of that if you have any. The study you linked was not related, and that doesn't match up with my own experiences with non-American.

The study is related - it shows an attitude to self esteem, while you're apparently trying to compare the self esteem itself.

Do you have a quote that describes that, because that's not what I saw at all. The basic summary is that while Chinese people tend to evaluate their skills more modestly than Americans, their emotional self esteem is just as high. I didn't see anything analyzing how they value their self esteem, or how it affects their behavior.

>>Do not forget that this very "self esteem" thingy is almost exclusively American. The other nations do not even think in such terms.

This over inflated sense of importance or "self esteem thingy" may be exclusively American but not anywhere close to all Americans subscribe to it. There are 330+ million people of various ages and backgrounds living in the US. I don't see how painting with such a broad brush like you have been does anything but inflame debate.

My question is this though, as much as people like bandying DK around, has it not been replicated? Specific to you, has the effect not been tested anywhere outside North America?

The way I've come to see it is "The less you know about a subject, the less you think you don't know."

In other words, you have no solid grasp on the field and so cannot make an effective guess at your ability in the field - so go for middle of the road and that's possibly your best statistical guess...

In a way, it's pretty intuitive. Beginners are looking down the rabbit hole and think "well I've got this far so it can't go that much deeper can it"? They've got a CRUD app up and running and doing stuff - I remember I felt pretty invincible at that point.

A prime example from experience: "oh I know development. I use PHP includes all the time".

The biggest humbling exercise I do is to think back 6 months, 1 year and so on. I remember how much I thought I knew and what I produced (some stuff I'm still maintaining too, which is humbling in of itself). Realising how much I've learned between those times and realising I've barely made a dent both shows me how little I know and lights the " I must learn more" fire.

While on the other end of the scale:

"The more you know about the subject, the more you don't know."

Which explains the upper-quintiles topping out at at 70th percentile mean self-rating.

> What is, however, absolutely clear from the original study is that incompetent people have a highly inflated assessment on their own abilities: in all four experiments (!), the people with actual 10% abilities rated themselves at 50-70%.

I'm not sure this result is as surprising or as explanatory as D & K advocate.

If I ask you to estimate anything you have no experience measuring, then you'll probably ballpark around the average, maybe drift a bit above or below average based on how favorable you feel towards the thing you're measuring. That's exactly where everyone lands in the responses.

It's not like people in the 10th percentile are suddenly rating themselves in the 99th percentile or anything, most people are taking a blind guess that they're doing ok, pulling their weight, just a bit above the middle of the pack.

It shouldn't be surprising that this isn't correlated with performance, because "performance" and "evaluating the entire field of performers" rely on different skills and knowledge. You can be good at a thing and have never judged anyone else to rate them, let alone judged a sufficiently random sample of the population to get a sense for the average skill there.

We shouldn't have ever expected these things were correlated to begin with.

If you want to improve self assessment, don't just become more humble and self reflective, don't practice the subject in question, just go watch several random performers. Ranking what quartile you're in relies as much on knowing how random people do as it does on self evaluation.

I'm sure there are certain fields where the amount you realise you do not know is proportional to how much you do know.

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