Ideas worth spreading

Are you really as good at something as you think?

513,671 views |

Robin Kramer |

TEDxBrayfordPool

• September 2022

Does confidence equal competence? Not quite. In a talk that will make you better aware of yourself, experimental psychologist Robin Kramer delves into the Dunning-Kruger effect — which argues that those who are least capable often overestimate their skills the most — and explores just how good you are at judging your own abilities.

Does confidence equal competence? Not quite. In a talk that will make you better aware of yourself, experimental psychologist Robin Kramer delves into the Dunning-Kruger effect — which argues that those who are least capable often overestimate their skills the most — and explores just how good you are at judging your own abilities.

This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxBrayfordPool, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

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Find out how good you really are at identifying faces.

About the speaker

Robin Kramer

Experimental psychologist

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Robin Kramer uses experimental and computational approaches to try to answer questions like: “How do we learn new faces?” and “Are we any good at matching face photographs?”

Robin S. S. Kramer et al. | British Journal of Psychology, 2022 | Article

"Metacognition during unfamiliar face matching"

Two experiments investigating unfamiliar face matching (deciding whether two photographs show the same person or not) provide evidence that people who perform better on the task are also those demonstrating greater insight into their performance.

Robert D. McIntosh and Sergio Della Sala | The Psychologist, 2022 | Article

"The persistent irony of the Dunning-Kruger Effect"

Although the Dunning-Kruger effect has made its way into popular culture, there are clear reasons laid out in this article for why we should doubt its existence. But also for why its popularity seems to persist.

Eric C. Gaze | The Conversation, 2023 | Article

"Debunking the Dunning-Kruger effect – the least skilled people know how much they don’t know, but everyone thinks they are better than average"

Using a simple mathematical approach and some randomly generated data, Gaze explains how the Dunning-Kruger effect is an artifact of research design rather than a bias in human thinking.

Robert D. McIntosh et al. | Royal Society Open Science, 2022 | Article

"Skill and self-knowledge: empirical refutation of the dual-burden account of the Dunning–Kruger effect"

By asking people to complete a series of shape-based puzzles, McIntosh and colleagues take an advanced approach to understanding metacognitive insight. Their results show that the quality of metacognitive processing is unrelated to performance, so no evidence that the least skilled people are any different from the most skilled in this regard.

Robert Kurzban | Princeton University Press, 2012 | Book

Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind

As a result of evolution, Kurzban explains how the mind is made up of modules that sometimes do, and sometimes don’t, work together. Because of this, it might make sense for these modules to be “strategically wrong” at times, perhaps justifying our less-than-perfect self-insight.

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This talk was presented to a local audience at TEDxBrayfordPool, an independent event. TED's editors chose to feature it for you.

Read more about TEDx.

Find out how good you really are at identifying faces.