Why Do Stupid People Think They Are Smart?

We have all encountered situations where stupid people think they are smart. Thanks to the internet today, basic information about almost anything is accessible to almost anyone. So, most people know a little about many things; a good thing.

But underneath this seemingly-beneficial dynamic, there is something seriously going wrong. All of a sudden, we have flat earth societies and people claiming that vaccines are harmful. Why is this happening?

Think about it. It is not as if stupid people did not exist before. But now, we see them more visibly than ever? What has changed? In this essay, I explore answers to these questions. If you are interested in such a discussion, please read along.

To start understanding what makes stupid people think they are smart, we shall reflect upon an interesting story.

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The Story of the Two Stupid Robbers

On January 5th, 1995, two blokes named McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Earl Johnson robbed a bank in Pennsylvania at gun point. The interesting thing about these two was that they did not cover their faces or wear any disguises.

At one point, Wheeler even smiled at a surveillance camera. They were so confident in their approach that they robbed yet another bank on the same day. Needless to say, this did not end well for them.

Both of them were eventually traced from surveillance footage, apprehended, and slammed with multi-year jail sentences. So, what made them think that they could get away with showing their faces to surveillance cameras?

Well, it turns out that they were very confident that rubbing lemon juice on their faces would make them invisible to security cameras. That sounds absolutely stupid, right? Well, it is. But here’s the interesting bit.

This case directly inspired a professor of social psychology at Cornell University named David Dunning to study the psychology behind this phenomenon further.

The Psychology of Stupidity

Dunning started his research question with an interesting hypothesis about Wheeler’s stupidity. It was as follows:

“If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity.”

— David Dunning.

With this hypothesis as the starting point, Dunning and his graduate student Justin Kruger set forth to organise a research program. Their aim was to quantitatively measure someone’s perceived competence with respect to their actual competence.

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Scientific Experiments to Quantitatively Measure Stupidity

Dunning and Kruger conducted a variety of studies in the areas of logical reasoning, grammar, and social skills. They typically tested subjects on an area and asked them to rate how they perceived their performance.

Then, they went ahead and plotted the subjects’ subjective perceived performance against their objective scores. The result looked like this:

Notice how the subjects in the bottom quartile massively overestimate their ability, while those in the top quartile subtly underestimate their skills.

Eventually, Dunning and Kruger published their results in a paper titled: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.

This behavioural pattern in human beings was noted as a cognitive bias and eventually termed the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Why do Stupid People Think They are Smart?

Following this study, the cognitive-bias scientific community conducted many similar studies in various fields.

You have probably heard of studies where most people rate their driving skills above average or studies where most employees think that they belong to the top 5% of performers in the organisation.

It is indeed funny to realise that the origin of these studies lies with two bank robbers with lemon juice on their faces. Jokes aside, why is this effect so prevalent in stupid people? My understanding is that it is an evolutionary trait; a survival mechanic, if you will.

Cognitive biases get a bad rep in mainstream pop-science. However, they are parts of human/intelligent behavioural patterns that maximise chances of survival. In other words, these so-called biases create a subjective reality that enables the species to perform better over generations.

In the context of expertise, it is generally advantageous for a stupid person to seem smarter than they really are. It gives them access to social status, respect, etc.

Although cognitive biases such as the Dunning-Kruger effect are useful evolutionarily speaking, they do indeed cause issues. Don’t get me wrong.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is actually harmless most of the time; helpful even, especially for stupid people. However, in a minority of cases, it goes wrong. And when it goes wrong, it sometimes goes horribly wrong.

Why is Stupidity so Widespread Today? — The Main Issue

This is actually a trick question. Throughout this essay, I have been addressing “stupid people” as its own unique class.

The truth is there is almost no such thing as “stupid people” in an exclusively collective sense. We are all stupid in most walks of our lives, given our limited knowledge and experience, except for our narrow area(s) of expertise.

This is a direct consequence of our current hyper-specialised career-driven world combined with basic information access thanks to the internet. So, in short, we are all stupid in many aspects of our lives without realising it.

This partially explains why there is a massive surge in widespread stupid behaviour in our world today. A successful chemist thinks that her knowledge is transferable to other fields.

Armed with the Dunning-Kruger effect and oozing confidence, she spends a few hours informing herself on the internet and goes to intellectual war on Twitter against climate scientists who have spent several years studying their area of expertise.

The result? Well, blatant stupidity that makes us question why stupid people think they are actually smart.

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Why do Stupid People Think They are Smart? — The Underlying Issue

As a thought experiment, let us visualise non-scientifically and arbitrarily, how the Dunning-Kruger effect could work with perceived expertise as a function of knowledge. Such a plot might look like this:

The people at the far-left are not the issue. These are folks who have no idea about a subject and know that they don’t know enough.

The people at the right of the first peak are also not the issue. Those who do not know nearly enough (they are at the valley) struggle with their incompetence while the experts subtly underestimate their abilities.

The people around the first peak on the left are the issue; they think they know more than they do. But here’s the thing. We are all at the left peak in one or more areas of our collective knowledge-base at any given point.

What’s more, this discussion is based on a relatively arbitrary curve. What if the left peak is not really a thin peak, but a thick blob? Then, we are worse off than we originally thought we were.

My aim here is not to be too critical, but to demonstrate the omnipresent ignorance and confidence we carry with us.

Say that we all agree that all of us share this shortcoming; some more than others, but all of us do share it. What can we do to overcome the cognitive bias?

How to Overcome the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

Earlier, I mentioned that one of the underlying advantages of the Dunning-Kruger effect could be the confidence that it gives us in our subjective reality.

Although this confidence is objectively misleading, it might help us lead evolutionarily better lives.

Assuming this to be the case, one strategy to overcome the downside of the Dunning-Kruger effect could be to separate our attachment to social confidence as a measure of our self-worth.

Don’t get me wrong. Self-worth and self-confidence are important; but not at the cost of stupidity. Whenever we feel confident about our expertise or knowledge, a good question to ask is:

“How can I objectively test my level of expertise?”

A good test, even a subjective one, could reveal our own incompetence before we confidently take action. Further research done by Dunning and co. suggests that people who act stupid are often closed to criticism and are not interested in improving their knowledge or skills.

In today’s day and age, “positive framing” is sold as a fundamental trait of high-achievers. Whenever I note my own incompetence, I often hear statements such as “Don’t underestimate your level. You are not incompetent. Be more confident.” from my friends and family.

The thing is, I don’t feel any less confident because of my incompetence. If anything, I am more motivated to learn and improve. But I do accept my current position. Does that make me stupid?

Final Comments

I’ll conclude by quoting Socrates on the topic of wisdom:

“The only true wisdom is knowing when you know nothing.”

— Socrates

One way to interpret this statement is that in order to know that we don’t know, we need to know a lot. If Socrates is right, then we can only truly know of our incompetence in a subject after becoming experts in that subject.

Thankfully, this is only the case if we never objectively challenged our own (in)competence.

I am extremely thankful to the internet for the global access to knowledge that it provides. But at the same time, it also creates many incompetent ‘experts’ among us.

Let us not allow basic knowledge to get to our heads. Stupidity hurts everyone!

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Reference and credit: David Dunning and After Skool.

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Further reading that might interest you: 

• A Career Based On Passion Is Risky. Here Is Why?
• Asymmetric Dominance Effect: How To Make Sense Of Human Irrationality?
• Common Sense Is Not Really Common At All.

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