The proposer of the Dunning-Kruger Effect— Social psychologist David Dunning of the University of Michigan and Justin Kruger of New York University won the 2023 Psychology Award (2023 Grawemeyer Award in Psychology) for their identification of cognitive biases that cause people to overestimate their abilities.
Dunning is a professor and faculty professor of psychology at the Center for Group Dynamics Research at the University of Michigan Institute of Social Studies. Kruger is a senior research scholar at New York University Stern School of Business .
Gwyer Merle Awards are awarded annually to original and creative ideas that have a significant impact in the fields of psychology, music creation, world order, education and religion. The award was founded by Charles Grawemeyer, an industrialist, philanthropist and an University of Louisville alumnus who founded the award in 1984 with an initial donation of $9 million. The winner will receive a prize of $100,000.
Dunning and Kruger describe the "Dunning-Kruger Effect", which helps explain human tendency to greatly overestimate their own knowledge or abilities. In various fields, they find that people who are often the least skilled are overconfident because they lack the skills they need to accurately judge their skills.
"Dunning-Kruger Effect" was first described in their 1999 study "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." The paper was inspired by a news report that a bank robber smeared lemon juice on his face, thinking it would leave him invisible in front of the surveillance camera.
1999, they conducted four experiments and found that the part of people who lack the most in terms of humor, writing ability and logic ability always overestimate themselves. When their actual score is only 12%, they think that their score is above 60%.
In the experiment, Dunning and Kruger first asked professional comedians to rate the interestingness of 30 jokes as a reference for standard answers. They then asked 65 college students to rate the jokes, and compared their ratings with those of professional drama actors to rank the rankings. In addition, they would ask these subjects to see how they think their sense of humor is compared with their average level and ask them to rank themselves. After
sorted their abilities, the researchers got very interesting results.
Most people have an overestimated opinion of themselves in their judgment of their sense of humor. People whose test results are slightly higher than the average level are very accurate in predicting their own scores. The person who performed the best in the
test thinks he is only a little higher than the average. ——They have a low evaluation of themselves. The person who cannot identify the most interesting thing in the
test thinks he is above average. ——Their evaluation of their abilities in this regard is the least accurate.
Dunning and Kruger believe that people with poor abilities and people with good abilities have different reasons for misevaluating themselves. Those who are incapable have mistakenly overestimated their abilities. Even if they are given an objective measure, they will still overestimate their abilities. Those who are capable have miscalculated other people's abilities.
Dunning and Kruger explained the results of this experiment that only when a person really has a certain ability and really understands what this ability is, can he have a way to make an accurate assessment of whether he masters this ability. Therefore, those who do not have the ability cannot recognize their shortcomings because they do not understand what this ability is. After the paper "Dunning-Kruger Effect" was published, it was cited by more than 8,500 academic articles and widely cited in the mass media from discussions on issues such as national politics to educational policies.
Dunning said: "This study emphasizes the value of humility in our perspectives and beliefs, especially our perceptions and beliefs."
