New research confirms earlier findings that people who are incompetent don’t really know that they’re incompetent. It’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect and is one of my favorite cognitive biases.
The results are uniform across all the knowledge domains: People who actually did well on the test tend to feel more confident about their performance than people who didn’t do well, but only slightly. Almost everyone thinks they did better than average. “For people at the bottom who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60th or 55thpercentile, so, above average,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries. The same pattern emerges in tests of people’s ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess. “People at the bottom still think they’re outperforming other people.”
What’s really interesting is that truly competent people underestimate their capabilities.
Hmm. If you combine these individual factors with the “Peter Principle” (if anyone recalls that making the rounds of talk shows years back) wherein people tend to get promoted to a level of incompetence, that would explain a lot about This Crazy Modern World.
On a more personal note…if I think I’m an innately superior genius who is also knee-slappingly hysterical…mm kay. I don’t think I like this post after all.
That will be quite enough from you, Hew-mon.
We can’t measure any of this stuff accurately until we have an unafraid and absolutely unrestricted media. You can’t hold average people accountable for idiocy when the airwaves, internet and print media are chronically and deliberately jammed full of bullshit.
Actually Steve, you hit the nail on how hate radio works- it gives mediocre-to-dumb dead-enders a belief that what they say or do is significant and has merit, when the “facts” that they “know” is nothing more than a pile of misinformed garbage that would fail any objective test vs. reality.
In the back of their minds, I think anti-intellectual dumbasses know this, but they don’t have the strength to admit it or try to do better. So instead, they’d rather lash out at us “elitist lib’ruls” and drag us down to their level, both in knowledge and in wage levels. It’s really quite pathetic and weak, when you think about it.
It also explains why incompetent fools like Scott Walker and their mediocre IQ’s tend to surround themselves with people who aren’t much smarter than them, and/or value loyalty over results. Because they truly fear being exposed as the limited people that they are.
I estimate that I would score 100% on any test, even tests on subjects that I know nothing about. I’m not incompetent, I just have 12 ounces of gold to bribe the person marking the test. Note To The Kids At Home: Always Think About The Social Context And The Corruptibility Of Humans! 😀