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Bottom quartile guessed 60th percentile
The 1999 study
That result came from a 1999 paper by David Dunning, then a psychologist at Cornell University, and Justin Kruger, a Cornell graduate student. It was titled Unskilled and Unaware of It. Four experiments tested college students on humor, logic, and grammar, and the participants also guessed their scores, in both absolute and relative terms.
A smaller finding ran the other way: people in the top quartile often underestimated their relative skill, though to a lesser extent.
The proposed cause
Dunning and Kruger theorized that the skills needed to perform overlap with the skills needed to judge performance, so poor performers lack the metacognition to see their failures. Layer on the better-than-average effect, in which people overestimate their abilities compared to other people, and the worst performers overestimate the most. High performers also think they're better than average, but they underappreciate by how much, because of the curse of knowledge, in which we assume our knowledge is universally shared.
Why would weak skill hide its own weakness?
Judging an answer often takes the same knowledge as producing it. In the fourth experiment of the 1999 paper, which appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Kruger and Dunning gave participants a short logic training. Bottom-quartile participants who received it became more accurate at judging how they had done on the earlier test. The training that improved their skill had improved their self-assessment as well.
How common is rating yourself above average?
Most people rate themselves above average on many traits, which cannot be true of a majority. In a 1981 study, Swedish psychologist Ola Svenson found that about 93 percent of American participants ranked their driving skill in the top half of the group. About 69 percent of Swedish participants did the same.
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