The Dunning-Kruger effect is a “cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.” It is named after the authors of a 1999 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: David Dunning and Justin Kruger.
The title of their paper is “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” In the abstract of the article, we read: “Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error.” Since that original paper, other studies have been done that confirm that the Dunning-Kruger effect is present in a wide variety of fields.
Equally interesting was the result following improving the participants’ skills. When they gained greater competency, they were concomitantly better able to “recognize the limitations of their abilities.” In other words, the more their knowledge and skill grew, the less likely they were to overestimate their actual level of competency.
I think this phenomenon speaks to many of our own experiences with social media. Quite often, we see people who are not particularly well educated in a given field nevertheless have no qualms about forcefully expressing their opinions as facts and demonizing anyone who does not immediately acquiesce to their point of view. Based solely on the self-assurance and forcefulness of online opinion posting, one would think everyone is an expert on politics, economics, environmental science, and religion, even those who have no formal training in any of these fields whatsoever. By the number of “do your own research” retorts, one would be led to believe that a huge percentage of our contemporary population spends large amounts of their free time conducting intense autodidactic investigations into highly complex fields unrelated to their everyday duties. (And you thought they spent most of their time doomscrolling. How silly! Don’t you know they are busy “doing their own research” during their leisure time?) To put it hyperbolically, everyone thinks they are an expert on almost everything.
The more their knowledge and skill grew, the less likely they were to overestimate their actual level of competency.
Conversely, we occasionally come across someone who is highly credentialled, yet who gives all sorts of caveats regarding the limitations of their competency, even when discussing something that does pertain to their professional field. This is largely because they are more metacognitively aware of the aspects of the issue they have not researched in-depth. They might still have strong opinions about areas outside of their field, but they are more likely to grasp what it would actually take to be an expert in such a field and therefore more open to the possibility that—gasp!—their opinion is not 100 percent accurate.
Besides just being a sociological and psychological point of interest, I think this Dunning-Kruger effect can have significant consequences. While there are some very learned people with successful social media platforms, there are also a large number of people who have a substantial following but are not nearly as well-informed as they think they are. Yet this does not stop them from bloviating endlessly day in and day out about matters they are woefully underqualified to speak about.
Unfortunately, I see this quite frequently. What is more disturbing is how often such individuals refuse correction from someone more educated on the matter than they are. It becomes a contest of wills and virtue signaling. The underlying assumption seems to be “I’m a good person; therefore, I must be right and that other person opposing me must be wrong.” But that presupposition is not necessarily the case. Is it possible to be a person of goodwill who is simply ignorant or even misinformed about a given topic and one’s opponent, whether of goodwill or not, is actually more correct on the matter? That’s where humility comes into play.
Every now and again, however, I see a ray of hope. While the common assumption is that no one ever changes their mind through online arguments, I have had a few experiences where people acknowledged that I was, in fact, correct and thanked me for it. Sure, there are still plenty of other examples where people just insult me, but those few instances of humble reception of correction are encouraging.
More to the point, though, how can our knowledge of the Dunning-Kruger effect be applied to our own lives and social media interactions? I think it is a phenomenon that we should keep in mind before and during our posting sessions. We ought to ask ourselves: “How much do I really know about this topic? What would I need to do in order to actually become informed about this matter?” If we recognize that we are not particularly well-versed in a topic apart from our “feels” about it, then perhaps we could do one of two things: 1) avoid posting about it at all or 2) soften our language.
What do I mean by “soften our language”? Believe it or not, it is possible to express one’s opinion or current thoughts about a topic without being an overconfident jerk. Instead of saying things like, “It’s so obvious that this is the case, anyone who doesn’t see it my way must either be an idiot or a liar,” one could say, “My current position on this matter is X, based on these sets of facts, observations, or reasons.”
I am just as susceptible to not following my own advice here as the next person, so I’m not speaking from some place of superiority. Rather, I’m wondering if all of us, together, could make some improvements in two ways: 1) be more reasonable in the assessment of our own level of knowledge or skill and 2) be more charitable in our manner of expressing our thoughts. In other words, maybe we should ask ourselves in what way the Dunning-Kruger effect has manifested in our own social media use and strive to do better.