rrect judgment” (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Thus, people who are incompetent in an ability lack the necessary skills to accurately assess their incompetence in the ability. Their experiment consisted of four studies in which participants responded to questionnaires that measured the participants’ ability to determine their own competence in a given area (recognition of humor, grammatical skills, and logical reasoning skills). They argued that people who are “incompetent” in an ability, will develop inflated self-assessments due to the fact that they are not able to recognize their own incompetence. Overall, it was demonstrated that participants, other than those in the top quartile (the most competent), overestimated their abilities on the test, by about 12 percentile points. Those participants falling into the bottom quartile (the most incompetent), however, overestimated their abilities more than any other group, by about 48 percentile points. This supports Kruger and Dunning’s prediction that people who are incompetent tend to develop an inflated and inaccurate self-assessment of their abilities. The studies also found that the most competent participants tended to accurately or slightly underestimate their own abilities. This also provides support for the argument that competence in an ability enables a person to more accurately recognize his or her own competence, thus leading to a more accurate self-assessment (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). The fourth study of the experiment, which tested participants’ logical reasoning skills, also re-measured the participants’ assessment of their ability to recognize their logical reasoning skills after “training” them to recognize their poor performance on the test. This study found that, prior to training, incompetent participants once again greatly overestimated their abilities. However, after training, these participants’ as...
