The opposite of Dunning-Kruger is imposter syndrome

Nothing revolutionary here, but a nice little article all the same.

Yet if it's terrifying to feel like the only fraud in your field or organisation, it's equally terrifying to confront the truth that everyone is winging it. That's another reason why it can be hard to accept that the impostor phenomenon is universal : we desperately want to believe that there are grown-ups in control - especially in fields such as government, medicine or law.

Indeed, it has been argued that this is one reason people believe in otherwise ridiculous conspiracy theories. In some sense, it's actually more reassuring to believe that a sinister cabal is manipulating the course of history than that they aren't: that way, at least someone would be indisputably in charge.

Ultimately, you should probably worry more if someone tells you they've never felt like a fraud. These ultra-confident people may simply be too incompetent to realise how incompetent they are. This cognitive bias is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, and the classic example concerns a bank robber who was astonished to be caught despite having smeared lemon juice on his face, which he believed made him invisible to security cameras. It was an idiotic belief, of course - but he was too much of an idiot to see it. The truly incompetent, in short, rarely worry about being truly incompetent.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36082469