Autistic employees are less susceptible to the Dunning-Kruger effect

A study involving participants in Canada and the U.S. found that autistic employees are less susceptible to the Dunning–Kruger effect than their non-autistic peers. After completing a cognitive reflection task, autistic participants estimated their own performance in the task more accurately than non-autistic participants. The research was published in Autism Research.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability or knowledge in a domain tend to overestimate their competence. This happens because the skills needed to perform well are often the same skills needed to accurately judge one’s performance.

As a result, individuals who lack expertise may also lack the metacognitive insight required to recognize their own mistakes. High-ability individuals, in contrast, may underestimate themselves because they assume tasks that feel easy to them are easy for others.

The effect has been demonstrated in studies where participants with the lowest test scores rated themselves as above average. The bias has been observed in areas such as logical reasoning, grammar, emotional intelligence, and even professional decision-making. It does not mean that all incompetent people are overconfident, but that the tendency to overestimate one’s results is stronger in individuals with lower skill levels.

Study authors Lorne M. Hartman and his colleagues noted that existing evidence indicates that autistic individuals are less susceptible to social influence and cognitive biases than non-autistic individuals. They wanted to explore whether autistic individuals may also be less susceptible to the Dunning–Kruger effect.

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These authors conducted a study in which they compared autistic and non-autistic employees’ self-assessments of their performance on a cognitive reflection task. They looked at how much these assessments differed from their objective performance on the task.

Study participants were recruited through autism employment support organizations and social media. In total, the study involved 100 participants. Fifty-three of them were autistic. The average age of autistic participants was 32, and for non-autistic participants, it was 39 years. There were 39 women in the autistic group and 33 women in the non-autistic group.

Participants completed an assessment of autistic traits (the Subthreshold Autistic Trait Questionnaire), allowing study authors to confirm that the autistic group indeed had more pronounced autistic traits than the non-autistic group. They then completed a cognitive reflection test (CRT-Long). This test measures a person’s tendency to override intuitive but incorrect answers and engage in deliberate, analytical reasoning.

After completing this test, participants were asked to estimate how many test questions they answered correctly and to compare their ability to answer those questions to the ability of other people, giving estimates from “I am at the very bottom” to “I am at the very top.”

Results showed that participants who were the least successful in the tasks tended to overestimate their achievement, while those who were the most successful tended to underestimate it. However, the lowest-performing autistic participants overestimated their results significantly less than the lowest-performing non-autistic participants.

When looking at the average (middle) performers, non-autistic participants continued to exhibit greater overestimation of their performance than autistic participants.

Finally, among high-performing participants, autistic individuals underestimated their abilities more than non-autistic participants. While non-autistic high performers slightly underestimated themselves, the autistic high performers demonstrated a stronger tendency to underestimate both their raw scores and their percentile ranking relative to peers.

Overall, the difference between actual and estimated performance was significantly lower for autistic than non-autistic employees.

“Results indicated better calibration of actual versus estimated CRT [cognitive reflection task] performance in autistic employees… Reduced susceptibility to the DKE [Dunning–Kruger effect] highlights potential benefits of autistic employees in the workplace,” the study authors concluded.

The study contributes to the scientific understanding of the cognitive specificities of autistic individuals. However, the authors noted limitations, including a significant age difference between the groups and the fact that the sample consisted almost entirely of employed individuals, meaning the results may not generalize to unemployed autistic adults. Additionally, the study focused on analytical thinking; results may differ in tasks requiring social or emotional intelligence.

The paper, “Reduced Susceptibility to the Dunning–Kruger Effect in Autistic Employees,” was authored by Lorne M. Hartman, Harley Glassman, and Braxton L. Hartman.