This will explain a lot.

It turns out that incompetent people are too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence.

Luckily, we don’t just have to take the incompetent people’s word for it – there’s years of rigorous study to back this up.

For more than a decade, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has found in his research that it’s “intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don’t know.”

Dunning, working with Justin Kruger, a former colleague at Cornell now at New York University, told Life’s Little Mysteries, that in their studies, they give people a short test, tally their scores, then ask the subjects how they think they did.

People who didn’t do well on the test are only slightly less confident about their ability than those who performed well.

And everyone thinks they did better than average – even people who did very poorly on the test.

“People at the bottom still think they’re outperforming other people,” Dunning said.

It doesn’t matter what the test is about – logical reasoning, how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, grammar, the funniness of jokes.

Even when Dunning and his colleagues offer a $100 reward to those who can rate themselves accurately, study participants just can’t do it.

This inherent inability to accurately gauge our own level of knowledge may be an underlying cause of many of society’s ills, including climate change denialism, Dunning said.

“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.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Stay tuned. There’s more to come. Dunning’s related interest: “how people bolster their sense of self-worth by carefully tailoring the judgments they make of others,” he writes on the Cornell faculty website.

“That is, people tend to make judgments of others that reflect favorably back on themselves, doing so even when the self is not under explicit scrutiny.”