You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself by David Mcraney
Authors: David Mcraney
Tags: Psychological, Humor & Satire
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Whether it is to donate blood, assist someone in changing a tire, drop money into a performer’s coffers, or stop a fight—people rush to help once they see another person leading by example.
One final, awesome example is the Good Samaritan experiment. Darley and Batson in 1973 got a group of Princeton Theological Seminary students together and told them to prepare a speech on the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. The point of the parable is to stop and help people in need. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his disciples about a traveler who is beaten and robbed then left to die along a road. A priest and another man walk past him, but a Samaritan stops to help even though the man is Jewish and Samaritans weren’t in the habit of helping out Jews. After filling out some questionnaires, with the story fresh in their minds, some groups were told they were late to give the speech in a nearby building. In other groups the subjects were told they had plenty of time. Along their path to the other building an actor was slumped over and groaning, pretending to be sick and in need of help. Of the seminary students who had plenty of time, about 60 percent stopped and helped. The ones in a rush? Ten percent helped, and some even stepped over the actor on their way.
So the takeaway here is to remember you are not so smart when it comes to helping people. In a crowded room, or a public street, you can expect people to freeze up and look around at one another.
Knowing that, you should always be the first person to break away from the pack and offer help—or attempt escape—because you can be certain no one else will.
11
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
THE MISCONCEPTION: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation.
THE TRUTH: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.
Imagine you are very good at a particular game. Pick anything—chess, Street Fighter , poker—doesn’t matter. You play this game with friends all the time, and you always win. You get so good at it, you start to think you could win a tournament. You get online and find where the next regional tournament is; you pay the entrance fee and get your ass handed to you in the first round. It turns out, you are not so smart. All this time, you thought you were among the best of the best, but you were really just an amateur. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it’s a basic element of human nature.
Think of all the You Tube stars over the last few years—the people poorly twirling weapons and singing off-key. These performances are terrible, and not in a self-aware, ironic way. No, they are genuinely awful, and you wonder why someone would put themselves on a worldwide stage in such an embarrassing way. The thing is, they don’t imagine the worldwide audience as being more sophisticated than the small audience of friends, family, and peers they usually stand before. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
The Dunning-Kruger effect is what makes America’s Got Talent and American Idol possible. At the local karaoke bar you might be the best singer in the room. Up against the entire country? Not so much.
Have you ever wondered why people with advanced degrees in climate science or biology don’t get online and debate global warming or evolution? The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.
Of course, these are generalities. The economist Robin Hanson noted in 2008 that the Dunning-Kruger effect becomes a popular catchphrase near election time because it helps to paint opponents as being morons.
The actual research that coined the term was performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in experiments at Cornell around 1999. They had students take
One final, awesome example is the Good Samaritan experiment. Darley and Batson in 1973 got a group of Princeton Theological Seminary students together and told them to prepare a speech on the parable of the Good Samaritan from the Bible. The point of the parable is to stop and help people in need. In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells his disciples about a traveler who is beaten and robbed then left to die along a road. A priest and another man walk past him, but a Samaritan stops to help even though the man is Jewish and Samaritans weren’t in the habit of helping out Jews. After filling out some questionnaires, with the story fresh in their minds, some groups were told they were late to give the speech in a nearby building. In other groups the subjects were told they had plenty of time. Along their path to the other building an actor was slumped over and groaning, pretending to be sick and in need of help. Of the seminary students who had plenty of time, about 60 percent stopped and helped. The ones in a rush? Ten percent helped, and some even stepped over the actor on their way.
So the takeaway here is to remember you are not so smart when it comes to helping people. In a crowded room, or a public street, you can expect people to freeze up and look around at one another.
Knowing that, you should always be the first person to break away from the pack and offer help—or attempt escape—because you can be certain no one else will.
11
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
THE MISCONCEPTION: You can predict how well you would perform in any situation.
THE TRUTH: You are generally pretty bad at estimating your competence and the difficulty of complex tasks.
Imagine you are very good at a particular game. Pick anything—chess, Street Fighter , poker—doesn’t matter. You play this game with friends all the time, and you always win. You get so good at it, you start to think you could win a tournament. You get online and find where the next regional tournament is; you pay the entrance fee and get your ass handed to you in the first round. It turns out, you are not so smart. All this time, you thought you were among the best of the best, but you were really just an amateur. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it’s a basic element of human nature.
Think of all the You Tube stars over the last few years—the people poorly twirling weapons and singing off-key. These performances are terrible, and not in a self-aware, ironic way. No, they are genuinely awful, and you wonder why someone would put themselves on a worldwide stage in such an embarrassing way. The thing is, they don’t imagine the worldwide audience as being more sophisticated than the small audience of friends, family, and peers they usually stand before. As the philosopher Bertrand Russell once said, “In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”
The Dunning-Kruger effect is what makes America’s Got Talent and American Idol possible. At the local karaoke bar you might be the best singer in the room. Up against the entire country? Not so much.
Have you ever wondered why people with advanced degrees in climate science or biology don’t get online and debate global warming or evolution? The less you know about a subject, the less you believe there is to know in total. Only once you have some experience do you start to recognize the breadth and depth you have yet to plunder.
Of course, these are generalities. The economist Robin Hanson noted in 2008 that the Dunning-Kruger effect becomes a popular catchphrase near election time because it helps to paint opponents as being morons.
The actual research that coined the term was performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in experiments at Cornell around 1999. They had students take
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