the dunning–kruger effect

In 1999, two academics from Cornell University in the United States, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, published a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology with the title ‘Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments’. The so-called Dunning–Kruger effect has since become an established trope in the field of psychology, although most people outside that field have probably never heard of it. However, the conclusions reached by this pair have never been more relevant.

The authors begin by relating the story of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed two banks in Pittsburgh on a single day in 1995 in broad daylight. He was arrested that evening, less than an hour after footage from surveillance cameras was broadcast on the local evening news. When police showed him that footage, Wheeler was incredulous.

“But I wore the juice!” he muttered.

Apparently, he was under the impression that smearing his face with lemon juice would render him invisible to video cameras. I think that I can guess what gave him this idea—lemon juice can be used as a primitive form of invisible ink—but to believe that it would render him invisible to video cameras betrays a level of ignorance that beggars belief.

The authors then make three points. The first two are probably uncontroversial: (1) in many areas of life, success depends on knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue; and (2) people differ in the knowledge and strategies that they apply in these situations. The third point, which is more likely to evoke skepticism, is that when people are incompetent in the strategies that they adopt to achieve success, they suffer a double blow: not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and therefore make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence deprives them of the ability to realize their mistakes. Or, as Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man in 1871, “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

One example used by Dunning and Kruger is the ability to determine whether a given sentence is grammatically correct. If a person’s knowledge of grammar is incomplete or incorrect, then such an assessment would be impossible. Another example is the widely reported ‘above average’ phenomenon: when people are asked to assess their ability in a given task, more than half of those polled rate themselves as ‘above average’, which is of course mathematically impossible. Both are perfect examples of what psychologists call ‘cognitive bias’.

The current relevance of this concept should now be obvious: the present occupant of the White House clearly thinks that he’s a genius when he is probably of below average intelligence. The fact he has stated that he is more likely to trust his ‘gut instinct’ than the opinion of an expert merely confirms that diagnosis. And the possible consequences of such arrogance are likely to be beyond his ability to comprehend.

For example, it is doubtful that he is aware of what happened the last time tariffs were imposed on goods imported into the USA on the draconian scale he has implemented. The Smoot–Hawley tariffs, named after the Utah senator and Oregon congressman who sponsored them, were signed into law by President Herbert Hoover in 1930. And while they may not have actually caused the Depression of the 1930s, they certainly made it much worse than it otherwise would have been.

There is also an echo of that period in the pre-Christmas turmoil on global stock markets; the Wall Street crash of 1929 didn’t cause the Depression either, but it was predicated on irresponsible speculation, and it did lead to a drying up of credit, thereby aggravating the economic situation at the time. So trade wars are a good thing, are they Mr Trump?

And because fools don’t understand nuance, this buffoon has decided to pull the 2,000 US troops currently in Syria out of the country on the grounds that Islamic State has been defeated (and he can take the credit). No it hasn’t! The kind of poisonous ideology espoused by these perverts may have suffered a military setback, but its attractiveness to a small minority of Muslims will take much longer to eradicate. And he is too stupid to realize that President Erdogan of Turkey is rubbing his hands at the chance to go after the Kurds in northeast Syria without interference from the USA. There is a moral aspect to this situation too: as President Macron of France has commented, albeit less crudely, you don’t shit on your allies.

There is another aspect of the Dunning–Kruger effect that I haven’t mentioned thus far: if a person is functionally incompetent, not only are they unable to recognize that failing in themselves; they fail to see it in other people too. Trump supporters: take note.