Well, this is a must read... ( Archived) (17)

Well, there it is:

From Livescience.com

"A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don't have a good enough sense of humor to tell.

This disconnect may be responsible for many of society's problems.

With more than a decade's worth of research, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that humans find it "intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don't know." Whether an individual lacks competence in logical reasoning, emotional intelligence, humor or even chess abilities, the person still tends to rate his or her skills in that area as being above average.

Dunning and his colleague, Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now at New York University, "have done a number of studies where we will give people a test of some area of knowledge like logical reasoning, knowledge about STDs and how to avoid them, emotional intelligence, etcetera. Then we determine their scores, and basically just ask them how well they think they've done," Dunning said. "We ask, 'what percentile will your performance fall in?'"

The results are uniform across all the knowledge domains: People who actually did well on the test tend to feel more confident about their performance than people who didn't do well, but only slightly. Almost everyone thinks they did better than average. "For people at the bottom who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries. The same pattern emerges in tests of people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess. "People at the bottom still think they're outperforming other people."

It's not merely optimism, but rather that their total lack of expertise renders them unable to recognize their deficiency. Even when Dunning and his colleagues offer study participants a $100 reward if they can rate themselves accurately, they cannot. "They're really trying to be honest and impartial," he said.

If only we knew ourselves better. Dunning believes people's inability to assess their own knowledge is the cause of many of society's ills, including climate change denialism. "Many people don't have training in science, and so they may very well misunderstand the science. But because they don't have the knowledge to evaluate it, they don't realize how off their evaluations might be," he said.

Moreover, even if a person has come to a very logical conclusion about whether climate change is real or not based on their evaluation of the science, "they're really not in a position to evaluate the science."

Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.

The ultimate takeaway of the research is the reminder that you really may not be as great as you think you are. And you might not be right about the things you believe you're right about. And if you try to joke about all this, you might not come off as funny as you think."

Did he get paid to do all this research ?
There really are dumb people out there aren't there ?

I think he was pretty smart if he was able to get money to do research on something that everybody ought to know by observance alone, but we are so crazy to have some "authority" legitimize everything, that I think we are really the idiots because ultimately, we paid for it.

Well lets just say that I had enough of people "figuring out" how our mind works .They try so desperate to push their quasi science down our throat...

True. Most of it is common sense anyway, but there is a lot of money in pseudo-science.

This study gets my goat. Personally I think the "know-it-alls" are overrated and they think all of us sheeple out here are too dumb to know what's best for us.

The arrogance of the ivory towered intelligentsia is pathetic. They barely contribute to society in a real and tangible way. In fact, in many ways THEY are the detriment to society.

Examples? How about people in the US government, i.e. politicians. They work for us but they think they are the fonts of greatness and they know what's best for us. How can a lawyer from Boston know what is best for a farmer in Iowa? Yet these self-aggrandizers are suddenly experts on agriculture because they were appointed to a committee.

College professors are another example of this arrogance. They rule over kids who barely made it out of high school because the education system that THEY helpcompose and impose sucks. You have to bow down to these hermits of the real world and kiss their wrong asses on all subjective material and thought.

I say have a commission to study these temples of arrogance (and ignorance) and see how out of touch they are and how much they hurt society. I will volunteer to work for free on such commission.

You don't say? Really? Dumb people do not know they are dumb?? HAHAHA All you have to do is stay on this site a week to figure that one out.

Hey T...

My comments were pretty blunt but in no way were directed at Scubadiva. I was commenting about the article only.

BTW, I am below average intelligence and I am sure most in here agree with me...