Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. This stems from the inability to recognize one’s own ineptitude.Without self-awareness, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence. Named after social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger (Cornell).

The corollary to the Dunning–Kruger effect indicates that persons of high ability tend to underestimate their relative competence and erroneously presume that tasks that are easy for them to perform are also easy for other people to perform (Impostor Experience). In other words, people with low ability over-estimate their own competence, and people of high ability over-estimate the competence of others.