Effet Dunning-Kruger : Plus on est incompétent, plus on est sûr de soi.

[JacquesL]

Effet Dunning-Kruger : Plus on est incompétent, plus on est sûr de soi.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect
La version française est abrégée :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effet_Dunning-Kruger

Effet Dunning-Kruger

L'effet Dunning-Kruger décrit un phénomène selon lequel les moins compétents dans un domaine surestiment leur compétence alors que les plus compétents auraient tendance à sous-estimer leur niveau de compétence.

Ce phénomène a été démontré au travers d'une série d'expériences dirigées par David Dunning et Justin Kruger. Leurs résultats furent publiés en décembre 1999[1] dans la revue Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Dunning et Kruger ont noté que plusieurs études antérieures tendaient à suggérer que dans des compétences aussi diverses que la compréhension de texte, la conduite d'un véhicule, les échecs ou le tennis, « l'ignorance engendre plus fréquemment la confiance en soi que ne le fait la connaissance » (pour reprendre l'expression de Charles Darwin).

Leur hypothèse fut qu'en observant une compétence présente en chacun à des degrés divers,

  1. la personne incompétente tend à surestimer son niveau de compétence,
  2. la personne incompétente ne parvient pas à reconnaître la compétence dans ceux qui la possèdent véritablement,
  3. la personne incompétente ne parvient pas à se rendre compte de son degré d'incompétence,
  4. si un entraînement de ces personnes mène à une amélioration significative de leur compétence, elles pourront alors reconnaître et accepter leurs lacunes antérieures.

Ces hypothèses ont été testées sur de jeunes étudiants en psychologie de l' université Cornell au travers d'auto-évaluations dans les domaines de la logique et du raisonnement, en grammaire et en humour.

Une fois les tests complétés et les réponses révélées, on demanda aux sujets d'estimer leurs rangs par rapport au nombre total de participants. Il en résulta une estimation correcte de la part des plus compétents et une surévaluation de la part des moins compétents.

Comme le notèrent Dunning et Kruger,

« Au travers de quatre études, les auteurs ont découvert que les participants situés dans le dernier quartile pour les tests d'humour, de grammaire et de logique ont largement surestimé leurs performances. Alors que les scores les placent dans le 12e percentile, ils ont estimé faire partie du 62e. »

En parallèle, les sujets bénéficiant de véritables compétences ont eu tendance à sous-estimer celles-ci.
Références

  1.  Justin Kruger et David Dunning, « Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments », dans Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no 6, 1999, p. 1121–34

Supporting studies

Kruger and Dunning set out to test these hypotheses on Cornell undergraduates in various psychology courses. In a series of studies, they examined the subjects' self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank, whereupon the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated their own rank. As Dunning and Kruger noted,

   Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.

Meanwhile, people with true ability tended to underestimate their relative competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assumed, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others.

A follow-up study, reported in the same paper, suggests that grossly incompetent students improved their ability to estimate their rank after minimal tutoring in the skills they had previously lacked—regardless of the negligible improvement in actual skills.

In 2003 Dunning and Joyce Ehrlinger, also of Cornell University, published a study that detailed a shift in people's views of themselves when influenced by external cues. Participants in the study (Cornell University undergraduates) were given tests of their knowledge of geography, some intended to positively affect their self-views, some intended to affect them negatively. They were then asked to rate their performance, and those given the positive tests reported significantly better performance than those given the negative.[7]

Daniel Ames and Lara Kammrath extended this work to sensitivity to others, and the subjects' perception of how sensitive they were.[8] Other research has suggested that the effect is not so obvious and may be due to noise and bias levels.[9]

Dunning, Kruger, and coauthors' latest paper on this subject comes to qualitatively similar conclusions to their original work, after making some attempt to test alternative explanations. They conclude that the root cause is that, in contrast to high performers, "poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve."[4]
[edit] Cross-cultural variation

Studies on the Dunning–Kruger effect tend to focus on American test subjects. Similar studies on European subjects show marked muting of the effect; studies on some East Asian subjects suggest that something like the opposite of the Dunning–Kruger effect operates on self-assessment and motivation to improve:

   Regardless of how pervasive the phenomenon is, it is clear from Dunning's and others' work that many Americans, at least sometimes and under some conditions, have a tendency to inflate their worth. It is interesting, therefore, to see the phenomenon's mirror opposite in another culture. In research comparing North American and East Asian self-assessments, Heine of the University of British Columbia finds that East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities, with an aim toward improving the self and getting along with others.

References

  1.  a b Morris, Errol (2010-06-20). "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)". Opinionator: Exclusive Online Commentary From The Times. New York Times. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/. Retrieved 2011-03-07.
  2.  a b Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121–34. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64.2655&rep=rep1&type=pdf.
  3.  Charles Darwin (1871). "The Descent of Man" (w). pp. Introduction, page 4. http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#The_Descent_of_Man_.281871.29. Retrieved 2008-07-18.
  4.  a b Ehrlinger, Joyce; Johnson, Kerri; Banner, Matthew; Dunning, David; Kruger, Justin (2008). "Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent" (PDF). Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 105 (105): 98–121. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2007.05.002. http://www.psy.fsu.edu/~ehrlinger/Self_&_Social_Judgment/Ehrlinger_et_al2008.pdf.
  5.  Dunning, David; Kerri Johnson, Joyce Ehrlinger and Justin Kruger (2003). "Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence". Current Directions in Psychological Science 12 (3): 83–87. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01235. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118890796/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0.
  6.  Dunning, David, "Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (Essays in Social Psychology)," Psychology Press: 2005, pp. 14–15. ISBN 1841690740
  7.  Joyce Ehrlinger; David Dunning (January 2003). "How Chronic Self-Views Influence (and Potentially Mislead) Estimates of Performance". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (American Psychological Association) 84 (1): 5–17. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.84.1.5. PMID 12518967.
  8.  Daniel R. Ames; Lara K. Kammrath (September 2004). "Mind-Reading and Metacognition: Narcissism, not Actual Competence, Predicts Self-Estimated Ability". Journal of Nonverbal Behavior (Springer Netherlands) 28 (3): 187–209. doi:10.1023/B:JONB.0000039649.20015.0e.
  9.  Burson, K. .; Larrick, R. .; Klayman, J. . (2006). "Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: how perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 90 (1): 60–77. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.90.1.60. PMID 16448310.  edit
 10.  DeAngelis, Tori (feb 2003). "Why we overestimate our competence". Monitor on Psychology. American Psychological Association. p. 60. http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb03/overestimate.aspx. Retrieved 2011-03-07.
 11.  "Ig Nobel Past Winners". http://improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2000. Retrieved 2011-03-07.