Dunning Kruger Effect
Dunning Kruger Effect
This is one of the most prolific psychological effects that you will notice in everyday life- once you know what to look for.
When somebody first begins to learn a topic, they typically underestimate its difficulty and wind up vastly over confident in their own abilities. Over time, however, this confidence begins to drop off as more knowledge is learned (awareness of depth and complication of topic). Confidence then eventually picks up again as true expertise is gained.
The implication is that the most confident people often know very little about a subject- in fact, they know so little that they don't even understand how complicated the matter really is.
The original study found a very interesting example concerning perceived and actual test scores among the participants.
To quote from the abstract:
Across four 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 test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.
You can see from the above chart that those who scored the worst on the test had the greatest overconfidence (difference between perceived and actual scores).
Basically:

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