By: steve-wang
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where incompetent people over estimate their abilities and competent people underestimate themselves. Is this bias real? There has been a lot of data and research done on this topic and it is generally agreed upon that it is real. However, I don't believe it until I see it. So, I have to see and test it for myself.
To test this, the researchers approached people living in Taiwan answer 9 trivia Questions about Taiwan. Before they started the quiz, the recipients were asked how well they thought they would place in comparison to other people. Then, the recipients were given them a piece of paper and had them write down if they thought the answers were true or false. Here is the whole prompt: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bU7EAno4Sd3Rn6TGTaXlcmL4jhFwg1rLTD3e20Zt5LI/edit?usp=sharing
Here is the result: <csv> Gender,Age,Expectation 1 (Before answering),Expectation 2 (After answering),Correct answers F,2,1st,9,8 M,2,3rd,5,3 M,2,5th,9,5 M,2,5th,5,4 F,2,5th,5,3 F,2,5th,2,5 F,2,5th,5,5 M,2,5th,5,5 M,2,6th,3,5 F,2,7th,4,5 F,2,7th,6,6 F,2,7th,4,5 F,2,8h,6,5 F,2,8th,3,4 F,2,8th,3,5 F,2,8th,3,6 F,2,8th,5,4 M,2,9th,5,3 F,2,9th,1,6 F,2,10th,5,5 AVG,,6.45,4.65,4.85 </csv>
From the results, there seems to be no clear trend that can be observed. This might be because the sample size was too small. There were few groups of people tested and that might have caused the Dunning-Kruger effect to not be obvious. Another reason for this result might be the chosen topic. People may not be very invested about the facts of Taiwan and they may know that. A better topic might be something about games which might play to people's ego better. It might be easier to prove the Dunning-Kruger effect if the topic was more personal and important to the person. For instance, if we plan to do this test on a group of engineers, we might want to test them on some engineering facts instead of facts about Taiwan.
In conclusion, the Dunning-Kruger effect was not proven or disproven in the experiment conducted. However the data is still interesting because now we know that some people who live in Taiwan know quite a bit about Taiwan.