The internet-famous Dunning-Kruger Effect is
the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.
In essence, the less one knows about a given skill or field the less able they are to understand how limited their knowledge is, and they therefore tend to overestimate their level of expertise.
Impostor syndrome, on the other hand, is when someone feels they are in a position they don’t deserve, or that they aren’t skilled enough to warrant praise. This happens when a person expands their knowledge and begins to discover the branching paths within the vastness of a given field of knowledge; they realize that they know only a very small part of what is out there, so, ironically, as they develop expertise they will not feel like an expert — they will feel like they don’t know anything, like an impostor, while the Dunning-Kruger case carries on blithely.
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