<P> The study How Chronic Self - Views Influence (and Potentially Mislead) Estimates of Performance (2003) indicated a shift in the participants' view of themselves when influenced by external cues . The participants' knowledge of geography was tested; some tests were intended to positively affect the participant's self - view and some were intended to affect it negatively . The participants then were asked to rate their performances; the participants given tests with a positive intent reported better performance than did the participants given tests with a negative intent . </P> <P> To test Dunning and Kruger's hypotheses, "that people, at all performance levels, are equally poor at estimating their relative performance", the study Skilled or Unskilled, but Still Unaware of It: How Perceptions of Difficulty Drive Miscalibration in Relative Comparisons (2006) investigated three studies that manipulated the "perceived difficulty of the tasks, and, hence, (the) participants' beliefs about their relative standing". The investigation indicated that when the experimental subjects were presented with moderately difficult tasks, there was little variation among the best performers and the worst performers in their ability to accurately predict their performance . With more difficult tasks, the best performers were less accurate in predicting their performance than were the worst performers . Therefore, judges at all levels of skill are subject to similar degrees of error in the performance of tasks . </P> <P> In testing alternative explanations for the cognitive bias of illusory superiority, the study Why the Unskilled are Unaware: Further Explorations of (Absent) Self - insight Among the Incompetent (2008) reached the same conclusions as previous studies of the Dunning--Kruger effect: that, in contrast to high performers, "poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve". </P> <P> Two unique papers in Numeracy reveal problems with the graphic introduced in the 1999 Kruger and Dunning paper . Subsequent researchers used it, (y-x) versus (x) scatter plots, and related variants for nearly two decades . The authors show how a major part of the body of literature that used these approaches seem to have mistaken and interpreted mathematical artifacts as the products of human behavior . The two papers employed paired, well - aligned instruments of known reliability to examine the evaluation of self - assessment measures from the perspective of signal and noise . They show how the mathematical problems inherent in the Kruger - Dunning type graph can be overcome by other kinds of graphing that attenuate noise or employ categorical data from known novices and experts . When artifacts are eliminated, the evidence is strong that humans are generally correct in their self - assessments, with only a small percentage of the participants who were studied exhibiting performance that might merit the label "unskilled and unaware of it". The authors' findings refute the claim that humans, in general, are prone to having greatly inflated views of their abilities, but they support two other tenets of the original Kruger and Dunning research: (1) that self - assessment skill can be learned and (2) experts usually self - assess themselves with better accuracy than do novices . The researchers noted that metacognitive self - assessment skill is of great value, and that it can be taught together with any disciplinary content in college courses . </P>

When someone thinks they know more than they do