When social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger first introduced the Dunning-Kruger Effect in 1999, their work didn't exactly set the world of psychological research ablaze with interest.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is described as a cognitive quirk in which people with the least amount of knowledge or skill in a given field are as confident as those with the most expertise. At the time, it was treated largely as a curiosity, but not as terribly consequential research.

Twenty years later, the Dunning-Kruger Effect has been used to make sense of all manner of egregious errors in judgment, some with disastrous consequences, such as the sub-prime mortgage meltdown and financial crisis of 2008 or the Iraq War.

Read the full article at CBC Radio.