David Alan Dunning is an American social psychologist and professor of

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

. He is a retired professor of psychology at

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

Education

He received his BA from

Michigan State University Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...

in 1982 and PhD from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1986, both in psychology.

Research

Dunning has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries. He is well known for co-authoring a 1999 study with graduate student

Justin Kruger Justin S. Kruger is an American social psychologist and professor at New York University Stern School of Business. Education Kruger received his BS in Psychology from Santa Clara University in 1993 (spending his junior year at Durham Univers ...

after reading about two 1995 robberies in which the perpetrators wore

lemon juice The lemon (''Citrus limon'') is a species of small evergreen trees in the flowering plant family Rutaceae, native to Asia, primarily Northeast India (Assam), Northern Myanmar or China. The tree's ellipsoidal yellow fruit is used for culina ...

instead of masks, thinking it would make them invisible to

security camera A closed-circuit television camera can produce images or recordings for surveillance or other private purposes. Cameras can be either video cameras, or digital stills cameras. Walter Bruch was the inventor of the CCTV camera. The main purpose o ...

s. This study showed that people who performed the lowest at certain tasks, such as judging humor, grammar, and logic, significantly overestimated how good they were at these tasks. This study has since given rise to what is known as the

Dunning–Kruger effect The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in th ...

, a

cognitive bias A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, m ...

in which people mistakenly assess their

cognitive ability Cognitive skills, also called cognitive functions, cognitive abilities or cognitive capacities, are brain-based skills which are needed in acquisition of knowledge, manipulation of information and reasoning. They have more to do with the mechanisms ...

as greater than it is. The study also found that people who performed slightly above average at identifying how funny a given joke was tended to be the most accurate at assessing how good they were at the assigned tasks, and that those who performed the best tended to think they performed only slightly above average. In 2012, Dunning told ''

Ars Technica ''Ars Technica'' is a website covering news and opinions in technology, science, politics, and society, created by Ken Fisher and Jon Stokes in 1998. It publishes news, reviews, and guides on issues such as computer hardware and software, sci ...

'' that he "thought the paper would never be published" and that he was "struck just with how long and how much this idea has gone viral in so many areas."

Positions

Dunning is the executive officer of the

Society for Personality and Social Psychology The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) is an academic society for personality and social psychologists focused on promoting scientific research that explores how people think, behave and interact. It is the largest organization o ...

and the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology. He has also served as an associate editor of the ''

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology The ''Journal of Personality and Social Psychology'' is a monthly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the American Psychological Association that was established in 1965. It covers the fields of social and personality psychology. The edi ...

''.

Awards

In 2021, Dunning was listed by Stanford University as being in the world's top 2% most cited psychological scientists.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Dunning, David A. 20th-century births Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) Living people American social psychologists Cornell University faculty Stanford University alumni University of Michigan faculty Michigan State University alumni 20th-century American psychologists 21st-century American psychologists