In a Riff off the Sixth Sense, I See Dumb People

June 20, 2009 by mike.

They don’t know they’re dumb. They’re everywhere.

Well, that’s a little uncharitable, but also a bit funny.

What is also funny is that there is a study that explains how dumb people can’t figure out they are dumb. It’s known as the Dunning Kruger effect.

I think this explains so much about trickle down economics and the foreign policy expertise that has the US fighting wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan today.

clipped from en.wikipedia.org The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which “…people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it”[1]. They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average. This leads to a perverse result where people with less competence will rate their ability more highly than people with relatively more competence. Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. They won Ig Nobel Prizes in Psychology in 2000 with their report Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.

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