The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which incompetent people overestimate their abilities.
Unskilled individuals suffer from a false sense of superiority, mistakenly rating their abilities much higher than they are. This bias stems from the unskilled’s difficulty in recognizing their own limitations.
“If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. The skills you need to produce the right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”
—David Dunning
Conversely, highly competent individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, falsely assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.
If this is true (and extensive research seems to support these conclusions), this explains almost everything.
Ignorant people can’t help but think they are smart.
Zealots, fanatics, ideologues, judgmental family members, Fox News pundits, preachy douchebags, incompetent politicians, Biblical literalists, New York Jets fans, and the like are trapped in a world where it’s impossible for them to realize that they are ignorant because they are ignorant.
This makes their stupidity so much more understandable.
I can see it now:
Some idiot will be spouting off against same-sex marriage, or trying to explain how vaccines are dangerous, or insisting that backing into a parking spot makes sense. In the past, I might have argued these points. Tried to change the person’s mind. Defended the truth.
Now I will simply nod my head, smile, turn to my wife, and whisper, “Dunning-Kruger. Poor thing.”
No longer will I have to wonder if a person actually believes the nonsense that he or she is spewing.
They do.
And they can’t help it, because they are incompetent.
Unless, of course, I am a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect right now. Maybe I am the dummy to believe that Fox News pundits or anti-vaxxers are the dummies.
This is unlikely, given that Dunning-Kruger victims never question the possibility that they could be wrong. It’s an unshakable confidence in their ability, combined with the utter incompetence, that causes them to move through the world without pause.
I just paused, if only for a moment. I wondered if I was the dummy, which is more than any Dunning-Kruger victim would do.
The best part of the Dunning-Kruger effect the man who inspired the initial study.
McArthur Wheeler was a man who robbed two banks in 1995 after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, as lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger heard about this man and wondered how such a level of stupidity was even possible.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is how.
Poor guy.
He did, however, get released from prison after only eight years of a 24-year sentence, probably because the parole board thought that forever being connected to the Dunning-Kruger effect for his stupidity was punishment enough.
