David Dunning

David A. Dunning is an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at Cornell University.

Education

Dunning received his B.A. from Michigan State University in 1982 and Ph.D. from Stanford University 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 Justin Kruger, now of the Stern School of Business. This study showed that people who performed in 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, in which people who are bad at certain tasks mistakenly think they are in fact good at them. 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 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

In addition to being a professor at Cornell, Dunning is the executive officer of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology. He has also served as an associate editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.