Dunning-Kruger effect

Biological Parallel

Young male primates frequently challenge dominant males before developing the physical strength or coalition networks to succeed—inexperienced individuals lack the metacognitive ability to assess their own fighting capacity. Similarly, naive foragers in bird species overestimate their foraging efficiency until repeated failures calibrate self-assessment. The inability to accurately evaluate one's own competence is not a human quirk but a fundamental problem across species: you need competence to recognize incompetence, creating a bootstrapping problem wherever skill acquisition occurs.