The more we know, the more we know we don't know

What timing. I found a reference in a magazine or newspaper last week, and looked it up on the web a day or two ago. I had heard of the research a while back, but didn't know the name of the effect.
Update: I found a reference to the article on the web:
http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/when_lying_works_better_than_the_truth/Content?oid=571766

Then today, I found the reference below to the study on doctors.

It certainly fits real experience.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081003122713.htm

Female Medical Students Underestimate Their Abilities And Males Tend To Overestimate Theirs
ScienceDaily (Oct. 4, 2008) — Despite performing equally to their male peers in the classroom and the clinic, female medical students consistently report decreased self-confidence and increased anxiety, particularly over issues related to their competency.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect is the phenomenon wherein people who have little knowledge (or skill) tend to think they know more (or have more skill) than they do, while others who have much more knowledge tend to think that they know less.

They set out to test these hypotheses on human subjects consisting of Cornell undergraduates who were registered in various psychology courses. In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning examined self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank, whereupon the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated their own rank. As Dunning and Kruger noted,

Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile (bottom 25%) on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile (scoring as high or higher than 12% of the population), they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.

Meanwhile, people with true knowledge tended to underestimate their competence. A follow-up study suggests that grossly incompetent students improve both their skill level and their ability to estimate their class rank only after extensive tutoring in the skills they had previously lacked.

In 2003 Dunning and Joyce Ehrlinger, also of Cornell University, published a study that detailed a shift in people's views of themselves influenced by external cues. Participants in the study (Cornell University undergraduates) were given tests of their knowledge of geography, some intended to positively affect their self-views, some intended to affect them negatively. They were then asked to rate their performance, and those given the positive tests reported significantly better performance than those given the negative.[4]

Daniel Ames and Lara Kammrath extended this work to sensitivity to others, and the subjects' perception of how sensitive they were.[5] Some more work by Burson Larrick and Joshua Klayman[6] has suggested that the effect is not so obvious and may be due to noise and bias levels.

tags: incompetent cannot recognize competence