Question 540: Incompetence Incognito

The ___X___ effect explains a cognitive bias in people performing poorly in a task lack the meta-cognitive capacity to properly evaluate their performance.  Remaining unaware of their incompetence, such people fail to accordingly take any self-improvement measures that might rid them of their incompetence. 

Amongst the first experiments featured a group of undergraduate students who were asked to rate their performance for the class just completed - just as they walked out of an exam. In particular they were asked how well they had mastered the course material, and what they predicted their raw score to be for the test just taken.

After comparing the student's own impressions with their actual performance, a clear pattern emerged in the data: Worse students grossly overestimated their own performance, while top students somewhat underestimated theirs. For the bottom quartile, while their actual performance may have "put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated their mastery of the course material to fall in the 60th percentile and their test performance to fall in the 57th". Bottom performers tended to overestimate their performance by roughly 30%; a general pattern that has been replicated many times over since. Thus, people fail to grasp their own incompetence, precisely because they are so incompetent. 

The authors of the study won the Ig Noble for their work. The logical extensions of the study have been applied to describe phenomenon seen across the spectrum of human behavior - from climate debates to Sarah Palin, and reality TV to False Consciousness.

Name X

Answer: The Dunning-Kruger Effect