Happy Sunday,

“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up. If anyone thinks he knows anything, he does not yet know it as he ought to know it.”

1 Corinthians 8:1c-2

Dunning-Kruger
In 1995, a man robbed two banks in Pittsburgh in broad daylight. He wore no mask, no disguise, and even smiled at the surveillance cameras. And yet, when police knocked on his door later that night, he was shocked they had caught him.

The man had reportedly believed that rubbing lemon juice on his face would make him invisible to cameras.

The bizarre story caught the attention of psychologist David Dunning, a professor at Cornell University, who enlisted the help of graduate student Justin Kruger to study how a sane man could be so confidently wrong about how cameras worked. In 1999, they published a paper describing the Dunning-Kruger effect: a cognitive bias where people with little knowledge in a subject tend to overestimate their own competence.

Translation: Ignorant people don’t understand how ignorant they are… because they’re so ignorant.

The Dunning-Kruger effect has taken up permanent residence in conversations about the news—with the just-barely-informed fancying themselves experts—and I’m certainly guilty of chipping in to pay its rent. I’ll hear something mentioned in the news and unconsciously assume I’m a subject matter expert based on a single (unverified) data point on something like autopens, SNAP benefits, or international law. I’ll speak confidently on the subject, right up until I’m confronted with my ignorance.

I have found the most effective way to clean the lemon juice off my face is to apologize. Simply acknowledging to myself that I was wrong is not enough to knock me out of the habit, but when I force myself to apologize to someone else for my ignorance, the sting of embarrassment makes me slower to speak next time. 

Here’s your homework: apologize to someone for getting something wrong. Embrace humility, and admit to someone with whom you’ve disagreed that you actually didn’t understand what you were talking about.

What do you think?
Jason

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