Self-proclaimed experts more vulnerable to the illusion of knowledge

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-07/afps-sem071715.php

Public Release: 20-Jul-2015
Self-proclaimed experts more vulnerable to the illusion of knowledge

Association for Psychological Science

New research reveals that the more people think they know about a topic in general, the more likely they are to allege knowledge of completely made-up information and false facts, a phenomenon known as "overclaiming." The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"Our work suggests that the seemingly straightforward task of judging one's knowledge may not be so simple, particularly for individuals who believe they have a relatively high level of knowledge to begin with," says psychological scientist Stav Atir of Cornell University, first author on the study.

To find out why people make these spurious claims, Atir and colleagues David Dunning of Cornell University and Emily Rosenzweig of Tulane University designed a series of experiments testing people's self-perceived knowledge, comparing it to their actual expertise.

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"The more people believed they knew about finances in general, the more likely they were to overclaim knowledge of the fictitious financial terms," Atir says. "The same pattern emerged for other domains, including biology, literature, philosophy, and geography."

"For instance," Atir explains, "people's assessment of how much they know about a particular biological term will depend in part on how much they think they know about biology in general."

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The research team warns that a tendency to overclaim, especially in self-perceived experts, may actually discourage individuals from educating themselves in precisely those areas in which they consider themselves knowledgeable--leading to potentially disastrous outcomes.

For example, failure to recognize or admit one's knowledge gaps in the realm of finance or medicine could easily lead to uninformed decisions with devastating consequences for individuals.

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tags: incompetence, judging your competence, overrating yourself, Dunning–Kruger effect,