---
type: permanent
status: mature
created: "2026-01-24"
description: "Low competence breeds overconfidence; high competence breeds underconfidence — metacognition gap"
tags:
  - cognitive-bias
  - metacognition
  - self-assessment
---

# Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where people with low competence in a domain overestimate their ability, while people with high competence tend to underestimate theirs. It is fundamentally a failure of [[Metacognition]].

## Mechanism

- Beginners lack the knowledge needed to recognise their own knowledge gaps
- The same skills required to produce correct responses are the skills required to recognise correct responses
- As expertise grows, calibration improves -- experts understand the vastness of what they don't know

## Implications for Learning

- Students may feel confident after passive review (re-reading, highlighting) because they lack the metacognitive skill to detect shallow understanding
- [[Active Recall]] exposes real knowledge gaps that re-reading masks
- [[Formative Assessment]] provides external calibration when self-assessment fails
- Teaching [[Metacognition]] explicitly helps combat this bias

## Countermeasures

- Regular self-testing ([[Testing Effect]])
- Peer discussion and explanation
- Seeking disconfirming evidence
- [[Elaborative Interrogation]] -- if you can't explain *why*, you don't truly understand

## Connections

- Directly caused by poor [[Metacognition]]
- [[Active Recall]] is an antidote -- it reveals what you don't actually know
- [[Formative Assessment]] provides external feedback to correct miscalibration
- Relevant to [[Teaching Methodology Research]] -- teachers must design for this bias
- [[Growth Mindset]] helps learners accept rather than deny revealed gaps

#cognitive-bias #metacognition #self-assessment
