Who are these confident incompetents?

That is the question I took away from today’s Psych 1100 class today. We covered the Dunning Kruger Effect, amongst many, many other things, and that got me thinking about it not as an effect but as a population.

It seems to me like one interpretation of Dunning Kruger is that there exists a population of gleefully ignorant overconfident idiots in the world. If so, then at the risk of sounding a little fascist, these people need to be identified and addressed.

And not just because I think they suck dirty dog dong, but because they are capable of doing a lot of damage.

So who are these people?

Now it is possible that they are not a stable or even definable population. It could be that we are all the children of Sunning and Kruger sometimes, and thus what seems like a group of hardcore idiots is actually just the aggregate effect of individuals encountering their particular nadir.

But I don’t think so. The ability of the vast majority of people, whether they are D- or A+ students, to estimate their own abilities accurately surely points to the idiots being the outliers. Multiple studies have shown that at least 75 percent of people get it right. If it were evenly distributed throughout the population, that would mean everyone gets this sort of thing wrong a quarter of the time, and I doubt society could function were we all so foolish.

So I believe that these people must represent a population of low-information high-confidence individuals with a particular coping strategy for life, which is to have a very high opinion of themselves which they maintain by taking in as little information as possible so as to reduce the odds of something contradicting said high opinion to a minimum.

This means that, for these people, the information they ignore the most thoroughly and aggressively is evidence of their own incompetence, or indeed, any notion that anything they do has ever been wrong.

Essentially, these people substitute confidence for competence. And presumably, this actually works for them.

I can see how it might. Studies show that confidence leads to a lot of good outcomes (and incomes). There are fields, like management and sales, where overwhelming self-confidence can actually make you better at your job. Confident leaders inspire confidence in those led. Confident salespeople come across as sincere and caring.

Of course, they have also be minimally competent. All the confidence in the world won’t save a salesperson who sold a car to someone for a nickel. But from the point of view of the truly competent, these people must seem like a massive offense against all that is good and holy in the world.

Meritocracy alone demands that people who are incompetent do not get to have enormous confidence. Then again, if the salesman gets the job done, is he truly incompetent?

There’s a lot of different ways to contribute to society. Some are a lot less obvious than others.

Still, one has to assume that making your way through life taking in so little information must require a fairly extensive support network. The low information person must, without ever acknowledging it, rely on many other people to deal with reality and chop it into low-info-digestible chunks for them, or they would simply be unable to operate at all.

Now these people are not necessarily demonic. And they are not necessarily sociopaths either. They could just as easily be the really nice person who everyone loves and who overflows with concern and really, really wants to help out.

In fact, arguably, without a central competence of considerable magnitude to compensate, the likeability strategy seems to be the only one that could possibly yield any measure of success. The lovable but incompetent might inspire people to help them cope. The unlikable and incompetent will not have an easy time of life.

Note that this likability need not be broadly based, however. Climbing the ladder of success only requires the ability to make the people on the next rung like (or need) you.

Hence the really unpleasant spoiled obnoxious sadistic asshole who gets promoted instead of you. It is neither fair nor right, but if you are good at sucking up, very often you don’t need to be good at anything else.

A low information lifestyle also requires living someplace where everything is fairly safe and predictable. People in hostile and unstable environments who take in very little information are rather quickly removed from the gene pool. Survival in the “sate ot nature” requires focusing on every single detail of your environment because you never know what will be the datum that turns out to be super, super relevant when the heavy feces is coming down.

It may or may not surprise you, depending on how well you know me, to hear me confess to being one of these low information people. Strictly on the level of information from my environment, though. Other kinds of info, like the kind of things you get tested on in school, make it through loud and clear and in very high definition.

But I am notoriously disconnected from my surroundings. And it can definitely be said that I would be in a poor state indeed if I did not have people like my wonderful spectacular marvellous roomie Joe to be competent for me.

I remember living alone. It was bad. And not very pretty.

And I have been this way about environmental information. I have been a head in the clouds (or more likely, head in a book) person for as long as I can remember. Even when I was a happy little preschooler, I had a relationship with reality that was a lot more about what was going on in my head than what was happening in my world.

Some of us are just born to be the information processors and synthesizers (beep boop) of the world, I guess.

Luckily, being highly intelligent and possessing a certain sort of temperament that doesn’t tolerate a lot of self-delusion, I know what I am good at and what I am not.

And honestly, that gives me a huge advantage over the Dunning Kruger kids.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.