Justin Kruger

Justin S. Kruger is an American social psychologist and former professor at the New York University Stern School of Business. He earned a Bachelor of Science in psychology from Santa Clara University in 1993, spending his junior year at Durham University, and then took a PhD in social psychology from Cornell University in 1999. He is known for co-authoring a 1999 study with David Dunning in which people who performed worst on tests of humor, grammar and logic greatly overestimated how well they had done, while the best performers tended to underestimate their standing. The pattern became known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task feel an illusory superiority. Kruger is the 2023 co-recipient of the Grawemeyer Award in Psychology.