Alert icon
We're changing our privacy policy. This stuff matters.  Learn more  Dismiss

illusion of superiority

Loading...

Sign in or sign up now!
85,467
Loading...
Alert icon
Sign in or sign up now!
Alert icon

Uploaded by on Apr 27, 2009

The Dunning-Kruger effect.

Justin Kruger & David Dunning.
Unskilled and unaware of It: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

Journal of personality and social psychology
1999, vol.77, no.6, pp1121-1134
©1999 by American Psychological Association, Inc.
••••••••
PERCENTILES.
For those unfamiliar with percentile rankings, briefly....

Say you get 95% of questions right in a test — sounds good. But if everyone else does, then your performance is actually average. Percentiles are a method of marking, which ranks your score COMPARATIVE to other scores within a population.

If you rank at the 10th percentile, 10 percent of all scores, in the population tested, fall BELOW you. If you rank at the 90th percentile, 90 percent of all test results fall BELOW you — you've made it to the top 10. 50% is dead on average.

Bizarrely, in a tendency which has been termed the 'above-average effect', it seems most people — no matter what their competence/ability — perceive themselves as above average, hovering around the 60th percentile.

Category:

Education

Tags:

License:

Standard YouTube License

Link to this comment:

Share to:

Top Comments

  • God, this is so on the mark it's unbelievable.

    I have plenty of interesting two-sided debates with people, but those epic facepalm ones are always where the person I'm arguing with for some reason can't understand why my counter-arguments totally dismiss theirs needing them to come up with new explanations.

    I really think everyone should be forced to take logic classes (or more maths) at school to avoid this really common problem.

    [I realise how smug this comment looks, and don't care]

  • thought I had seen all of your vids but after half a year of discovering your channel I found this one. Good piece as well, thnx for all your uploads, I enjoyed all of them more than once!

see all

All Comments (829)

Sign In or Sign Up now to post a comment!
  • Beautiful, eloquent and thoroughly educational

  • I was just commenting on the "there are no gods 3" video and got into a "debate" with a person like the one described in the first part of this video... damn he got me pissed off U_U

  • @Jamma246, guy is proof this effect exists.

  • I'm incompetent at making videos, but for what it's worth, I thought this video was excellent.

    Bookmarked.

  • I don't think McArthur Wheeler is a good demonstration of the effect; if anything it speaks to the man's total gullibility. Of course, Wheeler may have thought that his "untouchable skill" would allow him to get away with the crime. Also, the quote from the zealot seems more like hypocrisy and absolutism than inflated assessments about his arguing skill. If he had persisted with his intractable fallacies and always thought himself "the better debater" then it would definitely apply.

  • Good work.

  • Interesting video! However, I'm not sure if anyone else had this problem, but it was so hard to hear! I had to put my dang ears right up to the side of my laptop to hear what was being said! haha :/ (I think I may possibly have -the- worst speakers, ever!) Funny enough though, all other sounds (music etc., system sounds...) on my pc are functioning fine! *wondering...is it the flash? the video itself? or deliberate? Curious :P

  • 28 people can't assess their own incompetence.

  • really enjoyed the video, great way of learning something new. Lots to ponder and apply. Ta mate

View all Comments »
Loading...
0 / 00Unsaved Playlist Return to active list
    1. Your queue is empty. Add videos to your queue using this button:
      or sign in to load a different list.
    Loading...Loading...Saving...
    • Clear all videos from this list
    • Learn more