The Dunning-Kruger effect, at its core, suggests that people fail to recognize their intellectual and social shortcomings because they simply lack the expertise necessary to see them. As such, the effect reflects a double-curse: People’s deficits cause them to make many mistakes, and then those exact same deficits prevent them from seeing their decisions as mistakes. As a consequence, the pervasive tendency for people to overrate themselves and their talents is not necessarily due to their ego, but rather to intellectual deficits that they cannot see. We all share this problem, in that we all have pockets of incompetence that remain invisible to us.

Over the years, the Dunning-Kruger effect and its implications have received a fair amount of attention in the popular press, even including a Doonesbury cartoon.

A long-form essay about the effect by one of psychologists who described originally it can be found at Pacific Standard, focusing particularly on the role of false beliefs in giving people undeserved confidence. Award-winning film documentarian Errol Morris published a 5-part essay musing about the effect and its impact on American history in his blog at the New York Times.

Elsewhere are several radio broadcasts and podcasts that deep into the effect in detail. A short treatment of the effect can be found on a 2016 episode of This American Life.

Longer discussions about the effect can be found at You Are Not So Smart. A wide-ranging radio program linking it to other psychological phenomena can be found at Ideas.

Recently, the phenomenon has been linked to the rejection of experts (BBC’s The Human Zoo) and to the field of agnotology, which explores how financial and political interests spread ignorance and doubt in the public. The classic historical example is how tobacco companies obscured the fact that their product caused lung cancer. To tie the effect to the business world, one can visit this lively video podcast A Sales Guy.

The original scholarly article by Kruger & Dunning that introduced the effect can be found here. A longer article reviewing the science about flawed self-judgment in general, covering implications for health, education, and the workplace, can be located here. A longer scientific review article focusing solely on research about the effect is here.

A book covering the psychological science on faulty self-judgment in general is Self-insight: Roadblocks and detours on the path to knowing thyself.

Over the years, several authors have written blog essays about the effect and their particular area of interest (e.g., medicine, politics, education, scuba diving, aviation, creative writing, the list goes on). One never knows what one might hit by googling “Dunning Kruger” and one’s favorite activity.

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