Too confident to know? Why Those Who Know Less Think They Know More

Why can knowing a little about something sometimes make us more confident than knowing a lot?

In this episode of Circuit Breaker: Rewiring Your Decisions, we explore the Dunning-Kruger Effect — a cognitive bias in which people with limited knowledge or experience in a particular area may overestimate their abilities. We look at how confidence and competence can become disconnected, and why recognising what we don’t know can be harder than it sounds.

But how can we tell the difference between genuine expertise and misplaced confidence? Discover how the Dunning-Kruger Effect shapes our self-perception, influences the way we judge our abilities, and reveals why learning often begins with recognising the limits of what we know.

Studies and links

• Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments | Research Gate | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (PDF)
• How the Dunning-Kruger Effect works | Very Well Mind The Dunning-Kruger Effect: An Overestimation of Capability