Metacognition

So many of us crack jokes, even though some are bad. Be warned, dad jokes are known for inviting eye-rolls rather than big laughs. 

First, a confession. My daughter would be the first to verify the last statement.

Which is to say: the gap of rating for jokes can be huge. I have heard about Dunning-Kruger effect for quite some time. Not until I read The Psychology of Effective Studying did I realise the seminal works of Kruger and Dunning come from a series of jokes. 

In their first experiment, they asked psychology undergraduates to review 30 different jokes that had been pre-rated for humour by a panel of professional comedians. The undergraduates' task was to rate how funny they thought the jokes were. Next, they were to predict how well they thought they could gauge the quality o the jokes in relation to their peers.

When it came to rating performance, there skill varied quite a lot. There was nothing peculiar about that. The oddity is that individuals with the least competence at rating the quality of the jokes turned out to overestimate their ability. The truth is, the more incompetent participants were, the more deluded they were about their competence. 

The findings of Kruger and Dunning were persistent, and were not confined to joke quality rating. Not once. Not twice. But repeatedly. The same pattern of results was shown for tests of logical and grammatical ability in several subsequent experiments.

The key takeaway for me is to try my best not to tell dad jokes on the coming Father's Day.