Worse-than-average effect

The tendency for people to rate themselves as below average at difficult or uncommon tasks, in contrast to the better-than-average effect.

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Social comparison theory: A theory that people evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves with others. Judgments of being below average depend on comparisons with an imagined or known group.
David Dunning: An American social psychologist known for research on metacognition and self-evaluation. His work with Justin Kruger helped establish how task difficulty alters comparative judgments.
Metacognition: The monitoring and regulation of one's own cognitive processes. Assessing competence on unfamiliar tasks requires judgments about one's own knowledge.
False consensus effect: The tendency to overestimate how widely other people share one's opinions or behaviors. Assumptions about peers can distort estimates of where average performance lies.
Reference group: A group used as a standard for evaluating attitudes, behavior, or personal attributes. Changing the comparison group can change who counts as average.
Justin Kruger: An American social psychologist whose research includes self-evaluation and social judgment. His joint research with Dunning examined reversals in self-assessment across task difficulty.
Self-efficacy: A person's belief in their capacity to organize and perform actions needed for particular goals. Below-average judgments can shape confidence about attempting difficult tasks.
Pluralistic ignorance: A situation in which people privately reject a norm but mistakenly believe others accept it. Misreading others' abilities or beliefs can skew perceived standards of comparison.
Self-assessment: The process of evaluating one's own abilities, traits, or performance. The effect is a systematic pattern within self-assessment.
Unskilled and unaware of it: The finding that people with low skill may lack the metacognitive ability to recognize their deficiencies. This related account predicts overestimation among the least skilled, rather than below-average ratings on hard tasks.