Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence

David Dunning , Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Cornell University

Abstract

A good deal of psychological research suggests that people are poor judges of their own skill and expertise.  I review evidence suggesting that one major difficulty people face in judging themselves is that their incompetence is invisible to them.  Poor performers in many social and intellectual domains face a double-burden.  Their deficits in skill and expertise lead them to make many mistakes, but those same deficits also leave them incapable of distinguishing good from poor decisions.  Because people tend to choose decisions that they think are the most reasonable, they often think they are doing just fine when in fact their decisions are in error.  In particular, I discuss the issue of “errors of omission” in self-judgment (of potential specific relevance, perhaps, to issues surrounding deafness), as well as the cues in the environment that mislead people to thinking that they perform competently.