February 22, 2005

According to the experts

Finally, we know why people who act like idjits don't realize it. According to a recent article in the Journal of Personal and Social Psychology,

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. - Source.
Or as Steve H. puts it,
The idea seems to be, if you're a gigantic dumbass, you're too much of a dumbass to know you're a dumbass. The fact that everyone calls you "dumbass" while you're growing up should be a clue, but you don't get it, because...you're a DUMBASS.

They actually have a term for the kind of intelligence it takes to realize you're an idiot. They call it "metacognition." - Source.

However, his post does not go into detail about the data collected to validate this study. The participants were asked to rate themselves in the areas of humor, grammar, and logic, with their results compared to those of experts. It is the experts' evaluation of the jokes used to evaluate the subjects' perception of humor that is the source of my consternation:
Expert ratings revealed that jokes ranged from the not so funny (e.g., "Question: What is big as a man, but weighs nothing? Answer: His shadow." Mean expert rating = 1.3) to the very funny (e.g., "If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is 'God is crying.' And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is 'probably because of something you did.'" Mean expert rating = 9.6).
Cute, really cute.


Posted by Susan R at February 22, 2005 02:02 PM
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