It refers to how people with insufficient ability are often more confident instead,
failing to recognize their own shortcomings while also underestimating the abilities of others—a cognitive bias.
As people's own level rises, confidence fluctuates up and down through different stages. The turning points of confidence have been given beautiful landscape names: the Peak of Ignorance, the Valley of Despair, the Slope of Enlightenment, and the Plateau of Stability.
In 1999, an experiment was conducted. First, through a series of logic tests, each person's level of logical ability was assessed, and some of them were selected for further advanced training. After some time, everyone took another set of tests, and afterwards each person was asked to predict their own ranking. Through multiple rounds of testing, it was found that subjects with poorer logical reasoning skills tended to overestimate their ranking, while trained subjects with better logical reasoning skills underestimated theirs. Later, they discovered similar phenomena across many areas of human behavior and summarized four typical behaviors of less capable people.
Less capable people tend to overestimate their own skill level
Less capable people cannot accurately recognize the level of others who truly possess the skill
People with low ability are unable to recognize and face their own shortcomings, or just how severe those shortcomings are
If people with low ability can greatly improve their competence through proper training, they will eventually come to recognize and acknowledge their previous level of incompetence
For example, 80% of people believe their driving skills are above average. New drivers feel full of confidence after 3 months of driving and are more likely to have accidents during this period, after which they gain a renewed understanding of their actual skill level.
How can we avoid the cognitive bias in the Dunning-Kruger effect? Twelve words: listen to advice more, don't be arrogant, keep your mouth shut, and take action. When we feel a skill is easy to pick up, we should listen more to how others evaluate us and how they rate the difficulty of that skill. When others find it difficult but we find it easy, don't rush to be arrogant—first observe whether the person saying it's hard is a bit more skilled than we are. So please use action as the yardstick to experience how hard growth really is.