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.
Until there is sufficient evidence we should be cautious.
However, let's use some comparative animal psychology. A sheep does not know (can not know) that humans are more intelligent That's the intellectual capacity of an animal (hard to test because we can't ask a sheep, however, that is based on observational behavior. So it's inferential evidence)
Forms of human emotions related to narcissism express a false sense of superiority (e.g., prejudice). A false sense of superiority is also perceived as arrogance (by those with more humility & or knowledge of the context-specific subject)
The opposite (on the spectrum) of arrogance is humility.
So, if someone with less experience (intelligence) has a low level of humility, that may cause self-delusions of superiority. The more emotive "ego" (attitude) dominates their minds & they lack the humility to accommodate that more experienced people (e.g., in a scientific subject) are in fact more informed than them.
The key point is that a low level of humility causes arrogance. If arrogance (a persistent, context-specific, social attitude) causes a person to overestimate their relative intelligence (e.g., the experience of a subject), that means they have not developed the cognitive skills to critically evaluate their own level of intelligence (accurately).
That's what l think (hypothesis) is the underlying emotive heuristics that manifest as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Intelligence is a first-person perspective. We can only infer other people's consciousness (not experience it directly). We assume that other people have the general same form of consciousness experience - based on their behaviors. But, the mind is extremely adaptive, and people's sense of subject reality evidently varies considerably.
But, there is an objective reality (e.g., our brains are neurological)
