The very skills and knowledge which are required to be efficient at a task are the same skills that a person requires to identify that they are not efficient at that same. Therefore, if an individual lacks such abilities, he remains not only inefficient at the work but also ignorant of their abilities.

Numerous theories have been put up to explain this effect, including:

The failure to identify a lack of mistakes and skills - Dunning suggests a deficit in expertise and skill creates two major problems. Firstly, it deficits the performance of the people in the task they are incompetent. Secondly, their limited knowledge and erroneousness make it even more difficult for them to identify their mistakes.

Absence of metacognition - this effect relates to the difficulties of metacognition. It relates to the understanding and ability to know what we are capable of and stepping back as we perceive our behavior and abilities from the outside and with a third-person perspective.

People usually evaluate themselves from their highly subjective and limited points of view. From this perspective which is so limited, they believe that they are knowledgeable, highly skilled, and superior. Thus, this leads to a great struggle of having a realistic view of our abilities

Little knowledge leads to overconfidence - another major factor that contributes is that when a person acquires even a little knowledge on a matter it can lead to the belief that they understand everything that is there about the subject. A person can be aware of the matter on the surface yet believes they are expert.

Our minds are wired to attempt to make meaning of the confusing variety of information we encounter every day. It is maybe not unexpected that we occasionally fail so totally to precisely assess how well we perform given that we attempt to break through the chaos and interpret our talents and effectiveness within our settings.