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<title>Incompetence is bliss</title>
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This was sent to a mailing list I subscribe to.
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Probably I don't have permission to publish this <nobr>here ...</nobr>
<h2>
Incompetence is bliss, say researchers
</h2>
<blockquote>
BY ERICA GOODE
<br>
New York Times
</blockquote>
<p>
There are many incompetent people in the world. But a Cornell University
study has shown that most incompetent people do not know that they are
incompetent.
<p>
People who do things badly, according to David A. Dunning, a professor of
psychology at Cornell, are usually supremely confident of their abilities
-- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
<p>
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured,
the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often
are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
<p>
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, the researchers -- Dunning and
Justin Kruger, then a graduate student -- suggested in a paper appearing
in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
<p>
``Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate
choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,''
wrote Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois,
and Dunning.
<p>
This 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 of the politically clueless to
continue holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign
strategy.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<p>
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.
<h3>
Aiming high -- real high
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<p>
Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for
example, subjects who scored in only the 12th percentile guessed that
they had scored in the 62nd percentile and deemed their overall skill at
logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.
<p>
Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test
ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to ``identify
grammatically correct standard English'' and estimated their test scores
to be at the 61st percentile.
<p>
On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes
according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against
those of an ``expert'' panel of professional comedians), low-scoring
subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their
skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers
said, the results were less conclusive.
<p>
Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study,
Kruger and Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their own
competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that, in the
absence of information about how others were doing, highly competent
subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they were -- a
phenomenon psychologists term the ``false consensus effect.''
<p>
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.
<p>
``Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in
others,'' the researchers concluded.
<p>
In a final experiment, Dunning and Kruger set out to discover if training
would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable subjects.
In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did improve the
ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance
realistically, they found.
<p>
The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's
assertion that ``he who knows best knows how little he knows.''
<p>
Such studies are not without critics. David C. Funder, a psychology
professor at the University of California-Riverside, for example, said he
suspected that most lay people had only a vague idea of the meaning of
``average'' in statistical terms.
<p>
But Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated that
there were many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their
competency and not be aware of it.
<h3>
Concrete clues
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<p>
In some cases, Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one's own inability
is inevitable: ``In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the
woods, you know you're incompetent,'' he said.
<p>
But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous;
even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite
laughter. And social norms prevent most people, when faced with
incompetence, from blurting out, ``You stink!'' -- truthful though this
assessment may be.
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