What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

There's gotta be a scientist-named phenomena for that.

An explanation I am not seeing: People may self-report opinions of their own performance that they feel are socially acceptable or socially protective of themselves. So it reverts to the mean because it remains within The Overton Window so to speak.

If your objective performance falls far outside the norm, even if you know it and are confident this is true, people may not accept that fact and trying to insist on getting credit for it won't get you credit. It will get push-back. It will get denial. It may even result in harassment.

If your objective performance is poor, you may be subconsciously hoping to influence the outcome positively. Most forms of assessment aren't entirely objective. To whatever degree you can protect yourself from negative social consequences by suggesting to other people that your performance was within some acceptable and expected norm, it is in your best interest to do so.

People who habitually do this kind of thing at work or in other socially meaningful settings may be unable to turn that habit off for purposes of a psychological study. They may not even be consciously aware of it. It's just a thing they do without really planning it. It's what they have always done.

For easy tasks, it may have the most impact to fudge a little and say "My performance is sort of normal-ish. Nothing to see here. Move along." whether you perform abnormally well or abysmally. Those are tasks most likely to not matter so much, not have high stakes, be easily done by just about anyone and so on.

In other words, if you suck at taking out the trash, probably anyone in the office can gather up the trash and take it out. It's not likely to be a firing offense. They will just have someone else do it who doesn't drop everything everywhere all the time and never bother you about your failure to be good at it.

But if they hired you for your PhD in mathematics, your understanding of complex math actually matters. You aren't readily replaceable. Trying to fudge about how well you understand it and claim greater ability than you have is something people will take great offense at. Being a little modest about it can help you keep your job while reducing expectations.

There can be a lot of benefits to managing the expectations of other people who know you can do something that's hard but don't understand the conditions under which you can pull that off, how much prep time you need, etc. It is actively problematic for everyone to think you can do (amazing thing) anytime and all the time with no lead time and no recovery time. That's a great recipe for burn out and other disasters.

In short, "The lesson I take from Dunning-Kruger is that self evaluation is hard."

I don't believe I can; I don't see it on the UX.

@dang?

So the Dunning-Kruger effect, most often used as a sophisticated form of ad hominem to discredit some idiot on the other side of the interweb and give himself intellectual gloss, has now degenerated as scientific knowledge to the point where it can be used as an indicator of itself, right?

At the risk of replecating myself and getting a crisis, everybody with a brain like mine could have seen that coming.

Sigh...