When Ignorance Raises Its Head

Twenty-five years ago, two psychologists from the United States identified a curious phenomenon: the less people know and understand, the more they exaggerate their knowledge.
But our robber tried to be clever, and instead of covering his face with a cumbersome and uncomfortable ski mask, he simply smeared lemon juice on his face, believing that the juice would blind the security cameras after all, lemon juice serves as invisible ink, so he thought it would surely make him invisible to surveillance.

Unsurprisingly, his creative disguise failed, and the robber was arrested and prosecuted. But the story did not end there.
When psychologists Kruger and Dunning at Cornell University heard about the case, they concluded that the robber’s stupidity protected him from awareness of his own stupidity. In simpler terms: he was too foolish to realize he was foolish.

In 1999, they published their findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
not only does their lack of skill lead them to make poor decisions, but they also cannot accurately assess their lack of skill, and therefore do not strive to improve.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that manifests when people with limited knowledge or skills in a domain tend to attribute to themselves higher knowledge or ability than they actually have. Since they are unaware of their lack of knowledge, they tend to think they know and understand more than they really do.

In four experiments they conducted, Dunning and Kruger examined the performance of several dozen students on tests measuring humor.
In 2002, researchers published a paper challenging Kruger and Dunning’s explanations for the effect.

The first is a statistical phenomenon called regression to the mean.
In this case, it predicts that people with very low scores will estimate their abilities as higher than they really are, while those with high scores will underestimate their abilities, meaning their estimates tend toward the average.
A systematic review published in 2016 summarized the findings of 53 studies that examined the Dunning-Kruger effect in information literacy the ability to handle information, define what information is needed, find, organize, evaluate, and present it.

Overconfidence in political knowledge can also influence how people assess the political knowledge of others.
In a 2018 study, over 2,500 participants completed online surveys that measured their political knowledge and their subjective assessment of it.
The results showed that, on average, participants with low scores exaggerated their performance both personally and in comparison to others.
Another recent study examined whether the development and expansion of social and digital media in recent years influenced the Dunning-Kruger effect.

According to the researchers, the expansion of the internet and online information sources over the last 15 years has significantly changed the media landscape and increased public exposure to political discussions.
They suggested that consuming political news via social networks might increase the Dunning-Kruger effect by creating a false sense of expertise.
Comparisons between surveys conducted in 2008 and 2020 showed an increase in the effect during these years.

However, researchers noted that it is not clear whether the online environment drives overconfidence or whether people who overestimate their political knowledge are simply more likely to consume online news content.
The Dunning-Kruger effect can negatively impact many areas, but in sensitive fields like politics, the cost can be particularly high.
When people with limited knowledge in an important and complex area see themselves as experts, they tend to form extreme and rigid opinions and ignore any argument that contradicts their assumptions.

This makes it increasingly difficult to have reasoned and rational discussions on crucial topics. Understanding the effect and being aware of it is important for recognizing the limits of our knowledge, especially in areas that affect everyday life.