How people learn to program9 min read

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

Justin Kruger, David Dunning · 1999 · Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77(6), 1121–1134

The worst performers put themselves near the middle of the pack — because the skill they lacked was the same skill they needed to notice.

Read the paper ↗doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121 ↗

The short version

→Across four studies of humour, logical reasoning and grammar, participants in the bottom quartile scored around the 12th percentile and estimated themselves at the 62nd.
→The proposed mechanism is a dual burden: the knowledge that makes you good at something is the same knowledge that lets you judge whether you did it well.
→Top performers were miscalibrated too, in the opposite direction — they underrated their rank, because they assumed the task was as easy for everyone else as it was for them.
→Study 4 is the one worth knowing: training people improved their self-assessment. Calibration is a skill that arrives with competence, not a personality trait.

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