David Alan Dunning (born 1960) is an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.
[1][3] Dunning has published more than 80 peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries.
He is well known for co-authoring a 1999 study[4] with graduate student Justin Kruger after reading about the 1995 Greater Pittsburgh bank robberies in which the perpetrators wore lemon juice instead of masks, thinking it would make them invisible to security cameras.
[8] In 2012, Dunning told Ars Technica that he "thought the paper would never be published" and that he was "struck just with how long and how much this idea has gone viral in so many areas.
[2] In 2021, Dunning was listed by Stanford University as being in the world's top 2% most cited psychological scientists.