The Dunning Effect

We Are All Confident Idiots, written by David Dunning, was published in the Pacific Standard in October of 2014 It was written for a younger audience, as shown with the appearance of examples such as SXSW and Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show. It also has the intention of educating and setting straight some misconceptions about the way humans overestimate their knowledge on certain subjects. Dunning is a leading researcher on “the psychology of human wrongness”.

This article explains how humans are more likely to overestimate their education on a vast number of subjects, such as politics, art, music, and people. Dunning argues that incompetence often leads to overconfidence, and that this phenomenon isn’t just people being uninformed – it’s people being misinformed. Our environments, experiences, and facts we think we know, often lead us to believe we know things for certain. This then manifests as spreading or continuing to believe things that are not accurate. Many studies were done by Dunning and his student Kruger, demonstrating how when given a test for a certain task, people who were demonstrably wrong and people who were 100% right, had the same amount of confidence when answering the questions. Because even if participants guessed wrong, they still knew something about something, and that gave them the confidence to bring in experiences and notions that don’t apply to whatever they were participating in.

We Are All Confident Idiots, uses real life examples, studies, research done in controlled and uncontrolled environments, and topical pieces of media to explain the way people think and how they think things are correct. I think this source is useful because it gives us a sense of how research can be different from the traditional examples and allows us to look outside textbooks and think creatively and cooperatively.