The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation – Economics from the Top Down
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Do unskilled people actually underestimate their incompetence?

Have you heard of the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’? It’s the (apparent) tendency for unskilled people to overestimate their competence. Discovered in 1999 by psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning, the effect has since become famous.

Except there’s a problem.

The Dunning-Kruger effect also emerges from data in which it shouldn’t. For instance, if you carefully craft random data so that it does not contain a Dunning-Kruger effect, you will still find the effect. The reason turns out to be embarrassingly simple: the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology.1 It is a statistical artifact — a stunning example of autocorrelation.

EDIT: see response from dustyData and the article they linked to https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/dunning-kruger-effect-and-its-discontents

  • @dustyDataEnglish
    45•9 months ago

    I trust a political economist opinion on psychology as much as I trust my car mechanic’s opinion on cardiac surgery.

    Which is funny, because that’s a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. This Blair Fix guy doesn’t know as much of psychology as he thinks he does and he is unaware of it.

    Specially since Nuhfer et al made some egregious statistical mistakes themselves. Particularly as their critique is over something that was done in the 1999 paper but has not been done ever since nor in any of the subsequent studies.

    Here’s David Dunning response (2022) to most critiques. The most poignant is of course the argument that even if it is just an statistical artifact, it is still a real phenomenon worthy of study and of understanding the causes. Because the statistical arguments might debunk one experimental design, that the authors were aware of and corrected. But it doesn’t debunk the experimental designs of the subsequent paper that same year and the other thousands of papers published since.