Duh

We probably all have in our circle of acquaintances a know-it-all (maybe more than one) who tries to tell everyone else what to do. This behaviour is very odd. Despite the obvious evidence that we have managed to lead successful lives for decades, for some reason these people conclude that without their guidance we will fall into a life catastrophe at any moment. I have not been afflicted by this plague much, but the situation has cropped up from time to time. Because we are free to choose our friends, this kind of personality, once identified, can often be avoided outside family relationships. When we’re related to someone like that, simple avoidance stategies may not always work.

I am not referring to the occasional helpful hint from a friend on how to remove a stuck lug nut when changing winter tires or advice from a good cook on how to avoid sticky residue on frying pans. I mean the kind of person who tells you how to write a computer program when you have been doing so for 20 years and they just learned how to reboot their PC yesterday afternoon. I am talking about the kind of person who tries to convince you that you can enlarge, infinitely, a one-megapixel resolution digital photograph to 16 by 20 inches because we have powerful computers now. What strikes me about people like this is that even if you have the patience to ever so slowly explain to them what is wrong with their thinking, they seem incapable of understanding the explanation, and because of that failure they persist in believing that they are correct. It is as though they think that because they don’t understand what you’re telling them, then they must be right.

Put crudely, not only are they stupid, but they’re also too stupid to realize that they’re stupid. A double whammy.

I was lost in a reverie at work one day about this very dilemma when I came across this reference from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 77, no. 6, pp. 1121-1134. The article is entitled “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” and was written by J. Kruger and D. Dunning at Cornell University. They begin the article with an anecdote about a guy who robbed two banks in broad daylight on the same day without any facial disguise. He was very surprised when he was arrested that evening. He did not understand why the lemon juice that he had put on his face failed to render the video cameras ineffective, something he firmly believed to be the case. I don’t happen to know anyone that stupid, but it illustrates the point.

The authors conducted a series of tests in various areas such as, grammar, logical reasoning, humour, etc. and found that the people who scored the worst on these tests systematically overestimated their performance. They believed that they were better than they were. Interestingly, those who scored in the highest quartile tended to underestimate their performance. Their final conclusion is stated thus: “…We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it…” Having only barely scratched the surface of their research, I am certain that I have not fully conveyed their findings. I urge you to read the article yourselves; I believe that it’s available online. Still, it’s nice to know that my personal prejudices were vindicated in at least one laboratory experiment. The potential negative ramifications on corporate and political leadership are self-evident. To some of us.

You have to be careful when applying these findings however. Just because stupid people don’t know when they are wrong, does not mean that people, who think that they are right, are stupid. Sometimes, they may in fact be right and it’s you who are stupid. It’s an important distinction. Other difficulties arise from the relativity of what we consider to be intelligence. Just as there are always lots of people stupider than you (just look around), it is also always true that there are lots of people smarter than you (again, look around but these may be more difficult for you to spot for the very reasons alluded to in the article). If you’re at a party and say something that you think is very clever and everyone else looks away or changes the subject, it may be because you have just said something very stupid, without realizing it. When that happens, try to find a dumber-looking bunch of people to hang out with.