David Dunning quotes

David Dunning is a prominent American social psychologist known for the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias where unskilled individuals overestimate their abilities. With a PhD from Stanford University, Dunning is a respected researcher and professor at the University of Michigan. He has published numerous articles and studies on psychology and cognitive biases. Learn more about David Dunning and his groundbreaking work in the field of psychology.

In many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how incompetent they are.

- David Dunning

When people are uninformed, they know they don’t know the answer, and so they will be more open to hearing from others with real expertise. If we think they know enough, however, we’ll just cobble together what seems to us to be the best response possible to someone asking us our opinion, or a policy, or what we think. Unfortunately we’re programmed to know enough to cobble together an answer.

- David Dunning

What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.

- David Dunning

We’re living in a world in which we’re awash with information and misinformation. We live in a post-truth world.

- David Dunning

To recognize superior expertise would require people to have already a surfeit of expertise themselves.

- David Dunning

To fall prey to another person you have to fall prey to your belief that you’re a good judge of character, that you know the situation, that you’re on solid ground as opposed to shifty ground.

- David Dunning