Why the Most Ignorant People Are More Confident Author: David Dunning (USA) Publisher: China Translation Publishing House

Anyone who has interacted with others in school or the workplace may have the impression that many people's perceptions of themselves deviate from objective facts. Psychologist David Dunning has conducted in-depth research on this phenomenon and, together with Justin Kruger, proposed the "Dunning-Kruger Effect" (also known as the "Dunning-Kruger Effect"). This effect reveals some very interesting self-perception phenomena, such as: in a task, people who perform poorly tend to think that they are better than they actually are, while people who perform well tend to underestimate their performance. In this book, Professor Dunning comprehensively summarizes the research results on self-perception, analyzes why we tend to form cognitive biases in terms of personal ability and character, and reveals ways to avoid these cognitive biases.

Part I discusses people's misjudgments of their abilities and explores why people often fail to recognize their own inadequacies and character flaws. Part II discusses people's misjudgments of their character and explores why people tend to think they are more unique than they really are, why they tend to make unrealistically optimistic judgments about their moral character, and why they fail to anticipate the impact of their emotions on their choices and actions.

David Dunning is an American social psychologist and currently a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 2021, Stanford University released a ranking of the most cited works in the field of psychology, and Professor Dunning ranked among the top (top 2%).

His research focuses on the psychological mechanisms behind false beliefs, and his most well-known work shows that people tend to hold optimistic judgments about their abilities, character, and prospects that are not supported by objective evidence—a phenomenon that has important implications for health, education, work, and economic exchanges (the “Dunning-Kruger effect”).