Introduction (of a science paper)
Rarely does a research finding in Cognitive Psychology become part of the common parlance. The Dunning-Kruger effect (DK) is an exception (Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003; Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Named after the psychological scientists who discovered the phenomenon, the DK refers to the inverse relationship between one's actual aptitude and one's ability to accurately estimate said aptitude. In other words, while people generally exhibit some positive bias in assessing their own ability, this bias is heightened in those at the lower end of the distribution. It is thought that the second component of this “double curse” (Dunning et al., 2003) of inaccurate self-assessment, occurs due to a deficit in meta-cognition. This deficit in meta-cognition results in the failure to grasp what one knows and does not know.
Curtis S. Dunkel, Joseph Nedelec, Dimitri van der Linden,
Reevaluating the Dunning-Kruger effect: A response to and replication of Gignac and Zajenkowski (2020),
Intelligence,
Volume 96, 2023, 101717, ISSN 0160-2896,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2022.101717
@Empiricism_Reloaded Some argue that the effect is a statistical artefact https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/10/12/can-the-dunning-kruger-effect-be-explained-as-a-misunderstanding-of-regression-to-the-mean/#:~:text=Ed%20Nuhfer%20and%20colleagues%2C%20argued,actual.
One aspect of arrogance is its use as a self-defense heuristic. So, certain social contexts can nurture higher levels of arrogance.
