New video out on the Dunning Kruger effect, of lack thereof
Don't worry, you may continue to use this to insult people online
This is the accompanying video of our 2021 paper:
Kirkegaard, E. O. W. & Gerritsen, A. (2021). Looking for evidence of the Dunning-Kruger effect: an analysis of 2400 online test takers. OpenPsych
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a well-known psychological finding. Unfortunately, there are two aspects of the finding, one trivial, indeed a simple statistically necessary empirical pattern, and the other an unsupported theory that purports to explain this pattern. Recently, (Gignac & Zajenkowski, 2020) suggested two ways to operationalize and test the theory. We carried out a replication of their study using archival data from a larger dataset. We used two measures of self-estimated ability: estimated sumscore (correct responses), and estimated own-centile. We find no evidence of nonlinearity for either. We find evidence of heteroscedasticity for self-centile estimates, but not raw score estimates. Overall, the evidence was mostly inconsistent with Dunning-Kruger theory.