In Praise of Cluelessness
According to a study in the December issue of the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology (not available online, but the New
York Times ' Erica Goode deftly summarized it on Jan. 18), a fundamental
characteristic of incompetent people is their inability to recognize that they
are incompetent. The study begins with the following slapstick anecdote:
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed
them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested
later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from
surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later
showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I
wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression
that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape
cameras.
To test the principle of which the endearingly clueless Wheeler's story is
an extreme example, the study's authors, Justin Kruger and David Dunning of
Cornell, took a bunch of Cornell students and had them perform four tasks and
then estimate how well they'd done at each. In the first, they were asked to
assess how funny they found a series of jokes of markedly varied funniness (as
graded by a team of eight professional comedians). In the second, they were
asked to take a logical-reasoning test. In the third, they were asked to take a
grammar test. In the fourth, they were given another logical-reasoning test,
but this time some of those tested were subsequently given about 10 minutes'
worth of training in logical reasoning and then asked to re-estimate how well
they'd done on the test. In every instance but the last, the worst scorers
guessed that they'd done better than average. (Participants in the fourth study
were able to assess their abilities more realistically, but only by becoming
less incompetent.)
Kruger and Dunning compare people's inability to recognize their
incompetence to a neurological disability called anosognosia. Sufferers of anosognosia are paralyzed on the left
side of their body but don't seem to understand that fact; when asked to pick
something up with their left hand, they will decline by saying they're too
tired, or didn't hear the question, or don't want to. Kruger and Dunning's
finding also calls to mind the quotation from Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death that serves as the epigraph
to Walker Percy's novel The Moviegoer : "[T]he specific character of despair
is precisely this: it is unaware of being despair." Substitute the word
"depression" for "despair" and you have a cornerstone of modern
psychotherapy.
What the study's authors don't examine is whether cluelessness, while quite
often a bad thing for the individual, is a good thing for society. Kruger and
Dunning are careful to point out that in certain circumstances, it's impossible
for all but the clinically deluded to ignore evidence about one's relative
competence: "We doubt whether many of our readers would dare take on Michael
Jordan in a game of one-on-one, challenge Eric Clapton with a session of
dueling guitars, or enter into a friendly wager on the golf course with Tiger
Woods." These individuals' superior skill, regularly demonstrated in public, is
simply too great to ignore. And as their study showed, when incompetent people
are given a chance to wise up a bit, they do acquire some
retrospective understanding of their limitations.
The benefits of cluelessness come from living in a society where
people take an optimistic view of life. Political speechifyers are always
marveling about the bounteous opportunity of American life. What rarely gets
discussed frankly is how much the economy depends on people perceiving
that opportunity to be somewhat greater than it really is. Here is Chatterbox's former U.S. News boss James Fallows in his
1989 book More Like Us :
Overoptimism is in fact the common theme in many of the most purely
American phenomena: the myth that anybody can grow up to be president, that
immigrants' children can be doctors and lawyers, that you can turn your
franchise into a fortune, that salesman can make it on a smile and a
handshake. [David] McClelland [author of The Achieving Society ] said that the "famous
self-confidence" of businessmen--really, their refusal to face discouraging
facts--was an important tool for economic development. One of the best examples
was the completion of America's transcontinental railroads in the nineteenth
century. "When they were built they could hardly be justified in economic
terms," McClelland said. "They would never have been economically justified if
the country had not been 'swarming' ... with thousands of small entrepreneurs
who repeatedly overestimated their chances of success, but who collectively
managed to settle and develop the West while many of them individually were
failing."
The Internet economy is a more contemporary example of this phenomenon:
Surely most people trying to strike it rich in this gold rush will fail, but
right now their buoyant optimism is keeping the stock market high and making
America wealthier. Long live cluelessness!
