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Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6. ] 121-1134

Copyright 1999 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0022-3514/99/S3.00

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning
Cornell University
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilitiesin many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring inthe bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills ofparticipants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense. (Miller, 1993, p. 4)

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into twoPittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken .from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under theimpression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996). We bring up the unfortunate affairs of Mr. Wheeler to make three points. The first two are noncontroversial. First, in many domains in life, success and satisfaction depend on knowledge, wisdom, or savvy in knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue. This is true notonly for committing crimes, but also for many tasks in the social and intellectual domains, such

Justin Kruger and David Dunning, Department of Psychology, Cornell University. We thank Betsy Ostrov, Mark Stalnaker, and Boris Veysman for their assistance in data collection. We also thank Andrew Hayes, Chip Heath, Rich Gonzalez, Ken Savitsky, and David Sherman for their valuable comments on anearlier version of this article, and Dov Cohen for alerting us to the quote we used to begin this article. Portions of this research were presented at the annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Boston, March 1998. This research was supported financially by National Institute of Mental Health Grant RO1 56072. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Justin Kruger,who is now at the Department of Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 603 East Daniel Street, Champaign, Illinois 61820, or to David Dunning, Department of Psychology, Uris Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York 14853-7601. Electronic mail may be sent to Justin Kruger at jkruger@s.psych.uiuc.edu or to David Dunning at dad6@cornell.edu. 1121

as promoting effectiveleadership, raising children, constructing a solid logical argument, or designing a rigorous psychological study. Second, people differ widely in the knowledge and strategies they apply in these domains (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Dunning, Perie, & Story, 1991; Story & Dunning, 1998), with varying levels of success. Some of the knowledge and theories that people apply to their actions are...