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Maynard pontificates and confesses

Today I learned a new word. “Anosognosic”. I looked it up, so I know it’s real. There’s also a Wiki entry for “Anosognosia”.

Anosognosic: The apparent unawareness of or failure to recognize one’s own functional defect.

I encountered the word in this interesting article, “The Anosognosic’s Dilemma”. It opens with a comical (but true) description of a bank robber who was incompetent to a degree that defied belief. David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, read the story and tried to make sense of human behavior. How can people be so brainless?

As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. If Wheeler [the perpetrator] 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.

Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.

Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

It became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.

There’s a Wikipedia entry on the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

Kruger and Dunning set out to test these hypotheses on human subjects consisting of Cornell undergraduates who were registered in various psychology courses. In a series of studies, they examined self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were again asked to estimate their own rank, whereupon the competent group accurately estimated their rank, while the incompetent group still overestimated their own rank. As Dunning and Kruger noted,

Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd.

Meanwhile, people with true knowledge tended to underestimate their competence. Roughly, participants who found tasks to be relatively easy erroneously assumed, to some extent, that the tasks must also be easy for others.

So the stupid people think they’re smart, and the smart people think they’re stupid. Ain’t self-esteem grand?

In the world of private life and private industry, there are limits to the power of incompetents. If you screw up, your failure will be obvious to anyone that cares to look at it. If you can’t learn from your own mistakes, at least others will know not to rely upon you. If you run a business, it won’t be around for long.

As our government becomes more invasive about controlling our private lives, I worry about creeping, aggressive incompetence. It’s painfully obvious to so many of us that the lawyers in Washington know nothing about economics or medicine or manufacturing or mining or business operations or any of the other stuff created and managed by others that they grasp at. When confronted with their ignorance, our political leaders assert their moral supremacy and assume that any challenge to their authority must be of a nefarious nature. These people know they’re right, and anyone that opposes or even questions them must therefore be evil.

Me, I try to be smart enough to know my limitations — which, by the way, are pretty serious. But that’s okay, because I have no power over you, nor do I want any. I can’t coerce you or put your grandchildren into debt. So no one other than me is compelled to suffer because of my idiocy. And, since I have some notion of how stupid I am and I feel bad about it, there’s a chance I’ll manage to make myself less stupid in the future.

Now if only we can fix the anosognosics at the top of the pyramid. It’s probably too much to hope for their cure. But, rather than elevating such people to positions of authority, we really ought to incarcerate them in some comfortable little cubbyhole where they can’t spoil things for the sane Americans.