In 1995, a man named McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks in Pittsburgh (US) in broad daylight, without a mask/disguise.
In fact, he smiled at the surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank, and, unsurprisingly, he was found by the police and arrested.
When the police showed him the surveillance tapes, he was amazed and said, “but I wore the juice”.
Apparently, the robber had thought that rubbing lemon juice on his face would make him invisible because of his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as invisible ink.
Upon investigation, it was found that McArthur Wheeler was not crazy or on drugs — just mistaken.
This robbery led social psychologists David Dunning & Justin Kruger to study the phenomenon: “Why people fail to recognise their own incompetence?”.
In an experiment, they asked undergraduate students questions about grammar, logic, jokes, etc., and also how these students ranked themselves relative to other students in the study.
It was found that students who scored the lowest in grammar, logic, jokes, etc. overestimated their competence against others by a huge margin.
When people-with-low-ability overestimate their ability, it is referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The research found that incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person’s ignorance of a given activity’s standards of performance.
E.g., if you thought a computer was all about MS Word and you were good at typing, you would rank yourself much higher in computer skills as compared to someone who knows MS Word is just a speck in the computer world and typing is just one small part of it.
So, if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent.
This is because the skills required to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills required to recognise what the right answer is.
E.g., to get good at yoga (produce the right answer), you read about it, practise it, attend workshops and meet people who are good at it, and so, you realise it takes great effort and that your mastery of 10 out of 100s of asanas ismaybe just the beginning (recognition of the right answer).
While ancient wisdom also validates this principle (to a frog in the well, the well is the world), the Dunning-Kruger effect explains just a part of the “undermining the incompetence” phenomenon.
There could be other factorsGenes, a survival strategy, upbringing, environment, etc. too that lead incompetent people to believe they are brilliant; also, there have been researches that prove incompetent people are aware of their incompetence.
