Why are the least skilled people often the most confident?
Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments
The famous Dunning–Kruger effect: people who are bad at something often overestimate how good they are.
Ig Nobel 2000
Students took tests on logic, grammar and humour, then guessed how well they did. The lowest scorers thought they were above average.
The skills you need to be good at something are often the same skills you need to notice you’re bad at it. Experts, meanwhile, tended to slightly underrate themselves.
If you’re worried you might be in the study, you probably aren’t.