Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence

Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inCurrent directions in psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society Vol. 12; no. 3; pp. 83 - 87
Main Authors Dunning, David, Johnson, Kerri, Ehrlinger, Joyce, Kruger, Justin
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA Blackwell Publishers 01.06.2003
SAGE Publications
Subjects
College students
Gender differences
Grammar
Ignorance
Men
Personality psychology
Reasoning
Self
Social psychology
performance evaluation
self-evaluation
self-concept
overconfidence
metacognition
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Summary:Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.
ISSN:0963-7214
1467-8721
DOI:10.1111/1467-8721.01235