The title of this post is the question behind a news article, “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Probably Not Real,” by Jonathan Jarry, sent to me by Herman Carstens. Jarry’s article is interesting, but I don’t like its title because I don’t like the framing of this sort of effect as “real” or “not real.” I think that all these sorts of effects are real, but they vary: sometimes the effects are large, sometimes they’re small, sometimes they’re positive and sometimes negative. So the real question is not, “Are these effects real?”, but “What’s really going on?”
Continue reading “Can ‘regression to the mean’ explain the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’?”