Students Claimed to Know Terms Researchers Had Invented
Learning a little about a subject left students feeling sure about ideas they had never actually encountered.
Nautilus · Why We Think We Know More Than We DoStudents fresh out of a class on psychology and law claimed to know terms that researchers had completely invented. When asked whether they knew each concept on a list, they said yes to ideas taught in class and also to other psycho-legal concepts that had never been mentioned.
David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who co-wrote the 1999 paper behind the effect, described the finding from a newly published paper. The Dunning-Kruger effect comes from tests of humor, logic, and grammar in which the lowest scorers overrated their standing the most.
Dunning said the classroom result shows the same blur. After studying a subject, people begin to feel they know things they could not possibly know. As Dunning put it, "The boundary line between what you know and what you don't know is fuzzy."
Questions people ask
Were the students just lying to look smart?
Dunning does not describe it that way in the interview. He presents it as confusion about one's own knowledge, not deception, and says the line between knowing and not knowing is fuzzy.
Why would taking a class make this worse?
The interview does not give a detailed mechanism for this classroom result. In Dunning's broader account, the same skills needed to perform are needed to judge performance, so early learning can leave people without a good way to judge what they have actually learned.
Does this only happen to students?
No. Dunning points to Nobel Prize winners who speak on subjects outside their field, a pattern sometimes called epistemic trespassing. He says it was everywhere during the pandemic, when people leaned on a Harvard degree to opine about vaccines and epidemiology.