It’s been just over a decade since I came across an interesting article about research into competence /incompetence. The article was entitled “Why the ignorant are blissful: Inept individuals ooze confidence, study finds.”
It describes research supporting what I’d long suspected: Stupid people are too stupid to realize that they are clueless, and cannot be “enclued.” The results of the research appeared in the December 1999 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (in case you want the gory details).
The bottom line though is that incompetent people lack the skills to recognize competence itself.
So, why am I bringing this up? I subscribe to a “chat” list on line that often discusses politics and political matters. It’s obvious to me that the clueless often don’t “get it” on the chat list either. When it comes to politics, it would seem that the most clueless are most certain of what is good for the country (USA) and wouldn’t recognize bad government if it bit them on the ass. Fortunately, it’s easy to recognize such people because they’re the ones most likely to start the name calling, lacking, no doubt, competence in argumentation.
More info about the study
Dr. David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, gave tests in logic, English grammar and humor. Each test subject was asked to estimate how well he scored. Then he was given the opportunity to grade the tests of others and again estimate how he stood.
The interesting thing is, those who scored lowest on all three tests were most likely to overestimate how well they scored. The lower the score, the greater the overestimation. For example, subjects scoring in the twelfth percentile in logical reasoning estimated their scores to be in the sixty-second percentile. Subjects who scored higher tended to underestimate their scores.
Even more fascinating, after seeing the tests of others, the high scorers quickly revised their estimate of their own performance to reflect reality.
Low scorers did not, and sometimes even raised their estimates upward.
In short, incompetents are too stupid to recognize their incompetence, too stupid to learn to recognize incompetence and too stupid to learn from their mistakes.
People who do things badly are usually supremely confident of their abilities — more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
“Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,” wrote Kruger.
The deficiency in “self-monitoring skills,” the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market — and repeatedly lose out — and the politically clueless to continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.
Some college students, Dunning said, evince a similar blindness: after doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong.
In a series of studies, Kruger and Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they had performed.
In all three tests, subjects’ ratings of their ability were positively linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed much greater distortions in their self-estimates.
Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their own competence. The researchers attributes this to the fact that, in the absence of information about how others are doing, highly competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were — a phenomenon psychologists term the “false consensus effect.”
When high scoring subjects were asked to “grade” the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.
“Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,” the researchers concluded.
In some cases, Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one’s own incompetence is inevitable: “In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the woods, you know you’re incompetent,” he said.
But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous. And, in many cases, the feedback given by others is dismissed as simply “wrong.” I see this on the chat list all the time.
The political arena is thus perfect for the clueless and incompetent. They need only tell the clueless what they want to hear and their success is all but guaranteed.