Here’s Why Stupid People Don’t Realize They’re Stupid
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To know how skilled you are at something, you need to watch yourself, watch others and compare. If you don’t have the experience (or the mental firepower) to do this effectively, your judgements won’t be accurate.
To oversimplify it a tad — stupid people may be too stupid to realize they’re stupid:
Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.
Source: “Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence” from Current Directions in Psychological Science
It has since been dubbed the Dunning–Kruger effect:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to recognize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding.
Want to get smarter?
The most pleasurable way is to just make sure you’re getting enough sleep.
Via Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School:
Take an A student used to scoring in the top 10 percent of virtually anything she does. One study showed that if she gets just under seven hours of sleep on weekdays, and about 40 minutes more on weekends, she will begin to score in the bottom 9 percent of non-sleep-deprived individuals.
And cool it with the constant text messaging and email interruptions. They temporarily reduce your IQ more than marijuana.
A study done at the University of London found that constant emailing and text-messaging reduces mental capability by an average of ten points on an IQ test. It was five points for women, and fifteen points for men. This effect is similar to missing a night’s sleep. For men, it’s around three times more than the effect of smoking cannabis. While this fact might make an interesting dinner party topic, it’s really not that amusing that one of the most common “productivity tools” can make one as dumb as a stoner… when people do two cognitive tasks at once, their cognitive capacity can drop from that of a Harvard MBA to that of an eight-year-old.
Friends matter too. Surround yourself with people who believe in you and you’ll perform better.
Via The Heart of Social Psychology: A Backstage View of a Passionate Science:
…Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson (1968) did the same study in a classroom, telling elementary school teachers that they had certain students in their class who were “academic spurters.” In fact, these students were selected at random. Absolutely nothing else was done by the researchers to single out these children. Yet by the end of the school year, 30 percent of the the children arbitrarily named as spurters had gained an average of 22 IQ points, and almost all had gained at least 10 IQ points.
The first step is to believe that you can become smarter. May sound hokey, but it’s true:
Those students who learned about IQ’s malleability improved their grades more than did students who did not receive this message, and also saw academics as more important than did students in the control group.
(For the single most proven way to get smarter — and happier — click here.)
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