The Dunning-Kruger Song
A song about too many people you have had to encounter
Here’s a video of the ever-pertinent “Dunning-Kruger Song”:
The singer is Ray Bauwens. You may notice (with amusement and sympathy) that he messed up the words, a little, near the end. That was appropriate, but not intentional.
The song honors the research study “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 77, no. 6, December 1999, pp. 1121-34.
For writing that paper, Dunning and Kruger were awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for psychology, in the year 2000.
The behavior described in Dunning and Kruger’s study has become known as “the Dunning-Kruger Effect.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is on display every day, all around you.
“The Dunning Kruger Song” is the thrilling conclusion of “The Incompetence Opera,” which premiered as part of the 2017 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, and which you can watch on video in its entirety, if you wish.
NOTE: You can see this song performed anew — by soprano Maria Ferrante, who gave the first-ever public performance of this song — if you come to the AAAS Annual Meeting, in Boston, on the night of February 14, 2025, as a featured part of the Improbable Research show. (We do an Improbable Research show at that meeting every year. The meeting, by the way, bounces from city to city, year to year). That show is open to the public, free.
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