Are You Sure?
If a friend sent you to this page, they may be trying to tell you something. If you found it by yourself, consider that a point in your favor. This article appeared in This is True's 23 January 2000 issue:
Weekly Weird News
Even Your Best Friends Won't Tell You
Sure there are a lot of incompetent people around. The problem is, they don't know it, says Dr. David A. Dunning, a psychology professor at New York's Cornell University, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. He says that the reason they don't know is that the skills people need to recognize incompetence are the same skills they need to be competent in the first place. Thus the incompetent often end up "grossly overestimating" their own competency, even when they're making a mess of things. At the same time, very competent people tend to underestimate their abilities. Dunning notes such studies create a unique danger for the researchers. "I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at and I didn't know it," he said. (New York Times) ...If you want to know what they are, just ask your wife.
2 Comments on This Entry
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Posted by Nick, Detroit on December 17, 2011:
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:
"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance, as knowing so many things that ain't so." --Josh Billings
Posted by Maarten, Netherlands on December 17, 2011:
This kind of reminds me of this Calvin and Hobbes cartoon