How the Dunning-Kruger effect can block progress
A brief way of explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it takes competence to recognize incompetence. A consequence of this is that people who are relatively incompetent are less able to recognize their own incompetence. Kruger & Dunning (1999) and Dunning et al. (2003) showed that in incompetent people there is often a self-overestimation effect: people with low performance tend to overestimate their own performance. The lower the performance, the higher the self-overestimation tends to be. The higher the performance the less people tend to overestimate themselves. The very highest performing people even tend to underestimate themselves. This phenomenon creates the painful situation that those who perform the lowest tend to underestimate their need for development the most. A new study by Pennycook et al. (2017) adds new depth to these previous findings.