Back in April, I wrote about the Dunning-Kruger Effect – the inability of an incompetent person to recognize their incompetence because they’re too incompetent to know any better. However, as quoted in a recent New York Times article, David Dunning himself calls it “the anosognosia of everyday life”. And being the brilliant man he is, Dunning can explain it much better than I can:
An anosognosic patient who is paralyzed simply does not know that he is paralyzed. If you put a pencil in front of them and ask them to pick up the pencil in front of their left hand they won’t do it. And you ask them why, and they’ll say, “Well, I’m tired,” or “I don’t need a pencil.” They literally aren’t alerted to their own paralysis. There is some monitoring system on the right side of the brain that has been damaged, as well as the damage that’s related to the paralysis on the left side. There is also something similar called “hemispatial neglect.” It has to do with a kind of brain damage where people literally cannot see or they can’t pay attention to one side of their environment. If they’re men, they literally only shave one half of their face. And they’re not aware about the other half. If you put food in front of them, they’ll eat half of what’s on the plate and then complain that there’s too little food. You could think of the Dunning-Kruger Effect as a psychological version of this physiological problem. If you have, for lack of a better term, damage to your expertise or imperfection in your knowledge or skill, you’re left literally not knowing that you have that damage. It was an analogy for us.
I don’t know when, if ever, it will happen, but I look forward to the moment I can unholster this baby and pull the trigger.
