Dunning Kruger.

I was listening to an interview with David Dunning the other day (of Dunning-Kruger fame), and he discussed one of the social experiments he used to highlight his point.

He gave a standard knowledge test with limited questions of various complexity to participants, and told them that he'd give them a fair amount of money if after the test they could correctly tell him how many questions they got right and how many they got wrong.

His point was seeing level of confidence, with the ability to cross-reference that with how correct they were, obviously. But what stood out to me?

Why wouldn't a high amount of participants just intentionally get every answer wrong, including ones they were confident on, and say zero? Like... if I was taking that test with money on the line, then 2+2=5, E=MC without squaring shit, and communism is effective at utility-maximizing resource allocation.

Sounds like free money for nothing other than swallowing pride, to me.