To Know What You Know: With Guests David Dunning & Andrew Flack

In this episode of Choiceology with Katy Milkman, we look at the often-misunderstood and surprisingly common Dunning-Kruger effect with an interview featuring one of the researchers who first identified it, David Dunning.

But we start with the story of Cecilia Jimenez, the humble Spanish grandmother and amateur landscape painter who took it upon herself to restore a fresco in her local church. The results made international headlines—and briefly made Ceclia Jimenez a household name—for all the wrong reasons.

Andrew Flack has a lot of compassion for Cecilia. He met with her several times in the process of writing an opera with composer Paul Fowler called Behold the Man about Ceclia’s ill-fated but ultimately beneficial project. 

Next, David Dunning explains how—contrary to popular belief—we are all at the mercy of the Dunning-Kruger effect from time to time, and that we should be more humble in recognizing what we don’t know about what we don’t know.

David Dunning is the Ann and Charles R. Walgreen, Jr., Professor of the Study of Human Understanding at the University of Michigan. The paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," co-authored with Justin Kruger, led to the bias being named The Dunning-Kruger effect. 

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