What is the Dunning–Kruger Effect?

2. Study Results

Dunning and Kruger tested students at Cornell University on humor, writing, grammar, and logic. They recorded each student's prediction of his or her own performance and compared predictions to actual scores on the test. Surprisingly, students that performed terribly on any given category and had no knowledge on the subject were able to accurately predict their poor performance. The students that had some knowledge of a subject, enough to keep their scores away from rock bottom, vastly overestimated their own expertise. The poet Alexander Pope wrote “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” in 1709, and that still holds true today.