🔗 The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation
What’s interesting is how long it took for researchers to realize the flaw in Dunning and Kruger’s analysis. Dunning and Kruger published their results in 1999. But it took until 2016 for the mistake to be fully understood. To my knowledge, Edward Nuhfer and colleagues were the first to exhaustively debunk the Dunning-Kruger effect. (See their joint papers in 2016 and 2017.) In 2020, Gilles Gignac and Marcin Zajenkowski published a similar critique.
Once you read these critiques, it becomes painfully obvious that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a statistical artifact. But to date, very few people know this fact. Collectively, the three critique papers have about 90 times fewer citations than the original Dunning-Kruger article.5 So it appears that most scientists still think that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a robust aspect of human psychology.6