Katherine Burson
Katherine Burson is the first author, with Richard Larrick and Joshua Klayman, of "Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it", a 2006 paper that tested the Dunning-Kruger claim across 12 tasks. It found that the best performers judged their standing less accurately than the worst when tasks were hard, and that perceived difficulty moves everyone's estimate. It is the main difficulty-based objection to the effect.
Who they are
What the vault has verified about Burson is the 2006 paper, read from its abstract. Nothing about her position or other work was checked, so none is stated.
The abstract says that people are generally inaccurate at judging how their abilities compare with others', and that Kruger and Dunning argued that unskilled performers lack insight into their relative standing and account disproportionately for the better-than-average effects. Burson and colleagues report that this does not hold across all tasks. Across 12 tasks in three studies, on moderately difficult tasks the best and worst performers differed little in the accuracy of their judgements. On more difficult tasks, the best performers were less accurate than the worst.
Key papers
Burson, K. A., Larrick, R. P., & Klayman, J. (2006), "Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(1), 60-77.
Key ideas
Judges at every skill level show similar degrees of error in judging their relative standing.
How hard a task seems drives miscalibration. The authors propose a noise-plus-bias model to explain the relationship between skill and accuracy.
The pattern in the original Dunning-Kruger studies depends on the tasks used. On hard tasks the usual ordering reverses.
Sources
- Burson, K. A., Larrick, R. P., & Klayman, J. (2006). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(1), 60-77. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.90.1.60. Abstract read at the Duke Scholars record.