In which Wolf opens day 7's door... Watch this episode on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/bDqiPeys8_A
Welcome to the Beware of Wolf Advent Calendar of Bad Thinking. To celebrate the holidays, I'm counting down the days until Christmas with a common type of bad thinking each day, described in 60 seconds. This holiday season, give the gift of good thinking by sharing these videos with your friends!
Today is Day 7: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect"
In 1995, two banks in Pennsylvania were robbed. The men were easily identified using security camera footage and arrested the same day. When shown the security camera footage one of the men, McArthur Wheeler, was shocked and said, "But I wore the lemon juice!" Somehow he'd gotten it into his head that covering your face with lemon juice renders it invisible to security cameras.
Hearing this story got psychology professor David Dunning thinking: "If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity."
In 1999 professor Dunning and coauthor Justin Kruger published their landmark paper that showed that people who are unable to recognize their own incompetence tend to overestimate their abilities. They found that the same people who scored lowest on tests of humor, grammar, and logic also consistently estimated themselves to be well above average in these skills. This became known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
We see many case of celebrities, high-profile CEOs, and even Nobel Prize winners, offering certainty on things they know little about. But everyone is susceptible to the ego-inflating lure of "knowing enough to be dangerous."
Be humble about what you think you know. Practice self-reflection, and strive to continually improve instead of just relying on knowledge you already possess. Paradoxically, one of the best ways to avoid falling into the Dunning-Kruger trap is to learn enough about a subject to realize how little you actually know.
Happy Holidays!