Have you ever had a conversation with someone and no matter how plain and clear your points might be the other person simply doesn't seem to recognize them? They seem incapable of accepting even basic facts that can be objectively verified?
Or even worse, they position themselves as the one with superior ability?
Have you ever had such an experience and questioned your own position even when you know it's plainly obvious or well-researched?
Well, if this sounds familiar to you, you might have been witness to what's known as the Dunning–Kruger effect.
In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability have illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence
The psychological phenomenon of illusory superiority was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". The identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks with his face covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras. This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink.
This phenomenon explains the phenomenon of people of lower ability and intelligence thinking they are actually smarter and more skilled that people of higher ability and intelligence, even when the facts prove that is not the case.
I sometimes go to Donald Trump's Twitter page in the same way that Jane Goodall went into the jungle to study the behavior of gorillas.
The comments that Trump's account gets are astonishing: there are bots from the Left and Right, there are trolls galore, there are brainwashed Trump supporters, there are hysterical social justice warriors, there are generally diluted people on both sides of the polarized political system.
Oftentimes, I go there to find examples of psychological phenomenons and then write about them here. I think it's helpful to be able to recognize and identify these sorts of things: it helps me personally to be able to have a more transcendent view, and I hope it will help others to learn about what people around them might be doing so they can better manage challenging situations themselves.
Well, in this case, the person was a pure case study for the Dunning–Kruger effect.
I saw a reply by Rightwing political analyst and author, Mark Dice. Mark often comments on Trump's tweets, and they always create a storm of cognitive dissonance, so I checked the replies to see if I could find something interesting.
And I was not disappointed, because I saw this post.
Wow!
What a mouthful.
The post is quite clearly incoherent and has such bad grammar that it's indecipherable. But I'll try my best to decipher it.
I concluded that the post was the definition of irony: the expression of one's meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite. In other words: he's making fun of someone's intelligence by writing an incoherent post. So I replied.
This was just a simple statement of fact. I suppose, considering the hostile environment of Twitter, that it could be interpreted as an insult, but that wasn't my intention.
So, after reading that you are probably wondering what "intelligents" means. Well, I looked it up: intelligents is the French masculine plural of "intelligent". We can't assume that's the word he intended to use because even if he was using the French word for "intelligences", it wouldn't make sense.
He meant to say intelligence but he misspelled it. Which, again, is ironic.
The rest of the post is a CLEAR AND CUT case of Dunning–Kruger effect. He is claiming to be intellectually superior to me despite the fact that he hasn't demonstrated that he can even form a coherent statement and the fact that I am able to understand the concept of irony and he, apparently, is not.
I decided to give the benefit of the doubt and check weather or not he actually does understand the irony of his post and is simply being confrontational because it's twitter. So I replied:
Again, I'm really not trying to say anything bad about the guy. At this point I've become highly skeptical that the two of us would be able to hold a substantive conversation -- more than anything, I'm just curious if he actually understands the concept of irony.
He gave me two replies for the price of one!
Reply 1
and reply 2
Reply 1: again, he is claiming that he has a greater grasp of English than I do. FASCINATING! I've seen the Dunning–Kruger effect before, but never this clearly demonstrated.
And the comparison of my IQ to Trump's is hilarious because I'm SURE my IQ is MUCH LOWER than Trump's! According to this article:
However Mr Trump was a student at Wharton when it was possible to derive an accurate IQ core from known SAT scores. Given the usual requirements for admission to a top school like Wharton, I estimate that Mr. Trump has a 156 IQ at the minimum.
Even Snopes, who rejected the number from the article above, puts his IQ at around 145 and 149:
According to PrepScholar.com, Wharton’s SAT requirements are currently set at 1500. This roughly translates to an IQ score between 145 and 149, not 156.
An IQ score of 145 would put me in the top 0.1% of people on the planet!
Around 2% of the population has an IQ greater than 130 which is ‘gifted’ intelligence. This is an IQ of 2 standard deviations from the average IQ. This is Mensa standard – the IQ score on a valid, standardized IQ test required to become a member of Mensa.
WHAT IS AN IQ SCORE? WHAT DOES MY IQ SCORE MEAN?
Reply 2, again, is nonsensical. He's saying things with zero context, and using pop culture sayings incorrectly -- it's "stupid is as stupid does", which, again, demonstrates an astonishing lack of self-awareness and self-assessment.
I eventually replied with this, because it was honestly how I felt.
I want to make it clear that I am not trying to insult this guy. I believe my behavior has been very objective and analytical.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a fascinating phenomenon, as it explains so much of our current society. I believe that incidents like this are worthy of being disseminated and studied so that we may have better clarity of communication.
The fact is, if you are on one end of a conversation where the Dunning–Kruger effect is active, it's going to be a waste of time for you. So, since I was on that end of the conversation, I decided to make something worthwhile out of it!
Tell me what you think in the comments below.
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@shayne