Justin Kruger

Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. 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. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

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 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.

The Effort Heuristic

The research presented here suggests that effort is used as a heuristic for quality. Participants rating a poem (Experiment 1), a painting (Experiment 2), or a suit of armor (Experiment 3) provided higher ratings of quality, value, and liking for the work the more time and effort they thought it took to produce. Experiment 3 showed that the use of the effort heuristic, as with all heuristics, is moderated by ambiguity: Participants were more influenced by effort when the quality of the object being evaluated was difficult to ascertain. Discussion centers on the implications of the effort heuristic for everyday judgment and decision-making.

Actions, Intentions, and Self-Assessment: The Road to Self-Enhancement Is Paved with Good Intentions

Actions and intentions do not always align. Individuals often have good intentions that they fail to fulfill. The studies presented here suggest that actors and observers differ in the weight they assign to intentions when deciding whether an individual possesses a desirable trait. Participants were more likely to give themselves credit for their intentions than they were to give others credit for theirs (Studies 1 and 2). This caused individuals to evaluate themselves more favorably than they evaluated others (Studies 3-5). Discussion focuses on the motivational and information-processing roots of this actor-observer difference in the weight assigned to intentions as well as the implications of this tendency for everyday judgment and decision making.

Unskilled and Unaware—But Why? A Reply to Krueger and Mueller (2002)

J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999) argued that the unskilled suffer a dual burden: Not only do they perform poorly, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. J. Krueger and R. A. Mueller (2002) replicated these basic findings but interpreted them differently. They concluded that a combination of the better-than-average (BTA) effect and a regression artifact better explains why the unskilled are unaware. The authors of the present article respectfully disagree with this proposal and suggest that any interpretation of J. Krueger and R. A. Muellers results is hampered because those authors used unreliable tests and inappropriate measures of relevant mediating variables. Additionally, a regression-BTA account cannot explain the experimental data reported in J. Kruger and D. Dunning or a reanalysis following the procedure suggested by J. Krueger and R. A. Mueller.

Naive cynicism in everyday theories of responsibility assessment : On biased assumptions of bias

Evidence from several lab and field studies is presented that indicates that people have cynical intuitions about how others assess responsibility. Married couples (Study 1), video game enthusiasts (Study 2), debaters (Study 3), and darts players (Study 4) divided responsibility for a series of desirable and undesirable joint outcomes and estimated how others would apportion responsibility. In all studies, participants expected the responsibility allocations of others-but not their own-to be motivationally biased. This was true regardless of whether responsibility assessments actually were biased. In Studies 3 and 4, participants assumed that their teammates would be less biased than their opponents, suggesting that factors known to influence motivation can moderate the strength of this naive cynicism.

Slow Down! Insensitivity to Rate of Consumption Leads to Avoidable Satiation

Consumers often choose how quickly to consume things they enjoy. The research presented here demonstrates that they tend to consume too rapidly, growing tired of initially well-liked stimuli such as a favorite snack (experiments 1 and 4) or an enjoyable video game (experiments 2 and 3) more quickly than they would if they slowed consumption. The results also demonstrate that such overly rapid consumption results from a failure to appreciate that longer breaks between consumption episodes slow satiation. The results present a paradox: Participants who choose their own rate of consumption experience less pleasure than those who have a slower rate of consumption chosen for them.

When Social Worlds Collide: Overconfidence in the Multiple Audience Problem

Individuals sometimes try to convey different identities to different people simultaneously or to convey certain information to one individual while simultaneously concealing it from another. How successfully can people solve these multiple audience problems and how successfully do they think they can? The research presented here corroborates previous findings that people are rather adept at such tasks. In Study 1, participants who adopted different identities in preliminary interactions with two other participants (acting the part of a studious nerd with one and a fun-loving party animal with the other) were able to preserve these identities when they interacted subsequently with both individuals at the same time. In Study 2, participants were able to communicate a secret word to one audience while simultaneously concealing it from another. Despite their skill at these tasks, however, participants in both studies were overconfident in their abilities, believing that they were better able to solve these multiple audience problems than they actually were.

The Paradox of Alypius and the Pursuit of Unwanted Information

Prior work has found that people occasionally seek useless information, a violation of strict rationality. The present work examined whether and why curiosity can also cause individuals to seek harmful information. In five experiments, participants were given the opportunity to gain knowledge of questionable personal value. In each case, participants focused on their curiosity about the information and underweighted its consequences. As a result, participants tended to seek knowledge that they believed they would be better off without. Consistent with Loewensteins (1996) analysis of visceral factors in decision making, these effects diminished with a time delay and when deciding whether to expose someone else to unpleasant information. These results present a counterpoint to traditional hedonistic models of human motivation.

When Consumers’ Self-Image Motives Fail

Self-image motives and “sacrosanct beliefs” are powerful motivators of consumer judgment and decision making. The sacrosanct belief that one is rational, for instance, can cause consumers to justify seemingly unwise economic decisions. This article outlines some of the occasions when self-image motives appear to fail. For instance, although consumers occasionally pat themselves on the back for making questionable purchase decisions, at other times they find fault in perfectly reasonable ones. These and other recent findings provide an exception to the more general rule outlined by Dunning (2007).