Justin Kruger


Justin Kruger is an American social psychologist and professor at New York University Stern School of Business.

Education

Kruger received his B.S. in Psychology from Santa Clara University in 1993, and received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Cornell University in 1999.

Research

Kruger is known for co-authoring a 1999 study with David Dunning. 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.