Cognitive Bias: The Dunning Kruger Effect — A Case Study of Postgraduate Students in Fujian Normal University

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a purported bias of human metacognitive insight in which people who are incompetent in a given domain are unaware of their incompetence. In this exploratory study, a random sample of twenty-eight postgraduate students from the Fujian Normal University was selected to test this possibility. The results show that the grammar area basically follows the theory raised in the Dunning-Kruger effect — the top quartile students (those achieving above 75% in the test) showed a tendency to underpredict their test performance. Those who scored in the bottom 25% tended to overestimate their ability and test scores. Even when they are aware of what skilled performance would look like, individuals who are unskilled in a grammar domain might overestimate their performance.