I’ve been somewhat obsessed with mental fallacies ever since I read The Undoing Project, Michael Lewis’s book on Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman. (These led me to two other great books on the topic, including Kahneman’s Thinking Fast & Slow, and Leonard Mlodinow’s Drunkard’s Walk, which are two books I’d put on the list for anyone wanting to have a better understanding of the world and their own decisions.)
Anyway, I saw a facebook reel the other day pointing out the hilarious stat that, when polled, the vast majority of people–something like 80%–believe they are above the median in terms of their capability.
Obviously, 80% of people can’t be ‘above average,’ but more interestingly the video creator tied this to the Dunning-Kruger effect, pointing out that we all like to think we’re better than the average incompetent, but when polled together, we ‘all’ are clearly overrating our abilities.
It was an interesting point, but I think the general polling result aligns quite well with the DKE. If you take the inverse curve of the DKE, with a lot of over-confident incompetents on the left, accurately-competent competents on the right, and people who are competent enough to understand their incompetence in the middle, then you’d naturally see an overrating of confidence in the general population by simply adding the self-reported confidence of the accurately confident to the over-confident.
I don’t think this runs counter to the person’s point, but more to say that a society generally aware of DKE would still likely show an over-estimated self-confidence. The DKE makes more sense when applied to an individualized context. Eg, How do I rate my own competence in skill A vs how competent am I actually in skill A.
Anyway, here are a couple of interesting posts on the topic of the above-average effect and DKE if you’re interested:
