Dunning–Kruger effect

Looking over one thread on vekn.net , one of the users posted pretty interesting thing, called Dunning–Kruger effect. So naturaly I visited http://en.wikipedia.org and found out, what is this about.

Dunning–Kruger effect

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1. tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2. fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3. fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4. recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Dunning has since drawn an analogy to a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability because of brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of the disability, even for dramatic impairments such as blindness or paralysis.

Of course you can find out more about this on the internet or in literature, but it got me thinking how many times I have experienced this phenomenon. To be totally honest, I believe, that at one point, I have become "victim" of this illusion myself.

With tournament comming this saturday, I should once again evaluate my skills from rational point of view and apply the same for my opponents. Lately I have been taking competition at league games or even tournaments pretty lightly, so it is time to restart and train once again to become better player. I wish you all not to encounter this effect in future and play many quality games.

See you next time...