The invisible bank robber
In 1995, a man named McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks in Pittsburgh (US) in broad daylight.
He didn’t wear a mask or any other disguise.
And he smiled at the surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank.
Of course, the police found him and arrested him.
When the police showed him the surveillance tapes, he was amazed and said, “but I wore the juice.”.
Apparently, the robber thought that rubbing lemon juice on his face would make him invisible.
This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as invisible ink.
Upon investigation, it was found that McArthur Wheeler was not crazy or on drugs—just incredibly mistaken.
This robbery led social psychologists David Dunning & Justin Kruger to study the phenomenon: “Why do people fail to recognize their own incompetence?”.
They designed an experiment where a few undergraduate students were asked questions about grammar, logic, jokes, etc.
These students were also asked to estimate their overall score and relative rank to the other students.
Interestingly, students who scored the lowest in these tasks always overestimated how well they did—by a lot.
When people-with-low-ability overestimate their ability, it is referred to as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Research found that incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person’s ignorance of a given activity’s standards of performance. E.g., if you thought a computer was all about MS Word and you were good at typing, you would rank yourself much higher in computer skills as compared to someone who knows MS Word is just a speck in the computer world and typing is just a part of MS Word.
So, if you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. This is because the skills required to produce the right answer (knowledge about computers) are exactly the same skills you need to recognize what a right answer is (what does it mean to have knowledge in computers). This explains why incompetent people think they are amazing.
Image courtesy of Vchal through Shutterstock
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