RAW DOGMA written by Nkrumah Steward
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| Why Incompetent People Piss Us Off. |
All of us know someone that is just convinced of his genius. Often times these people spare nothing, not even tact when letting you know that they are the shit.
Many of us get frustrated when we try to help them see that they aren't nearly as sweet as they think they are because they tend to just dismiss our criticism as being just that of a person either "too stupid to recognize their genius" or just "jealous" that we aren't sweet.
Never does it occur to them, not for one single second, that maybe - just maybe --- you are telling the truth.
We all know these people. Sometimes they are our bosses. Sometimes they were our parent.
They will stand there and tell jokes over and over that aren't funny because they couldn't deliver a punch line right if it was packaged in a box.
The producers of American Idol have basically found a cash cow in exploiting the incompetent by televising the auditions of some of these people that sing like a hound dog with it's nuts frozen to the porch.
Researchers have now proven scientifically that incompetent people in fact don't know that they are incompetent. The reason is simple. The skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
However before you start feeling bad for them, incompetent people are also among the most "blissfully self-assured" people you would ever want to meet.
In other words, they think they are the shit. Overconfidence is very common among those that are incompetent.
For example, the vast majority of people that rate themselves as "above average" on a wide array of abilities are some of the most incompetent people who will ever meet.
"Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it," wrote Dr. Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, and Dr. Dunning who conducted the study.
People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who actually do things well.
In their study they showed that the lower a person scored on a test, the higher they thought they had scored in their self-estimates. They had subjects that scored in the 10 percent tile in an "identify grammatically correct standard English" test who when asked how well they thought they did placed themselves in the 67 percentile.
When they ran a logic test, the subjects that scored in the 12th percentile again placed their reasoning skills in the 68th percentile when asked how they think they did.
Dr. Dunning said that he often sees this in some college students who after doing poorly on a test spend hours in his office actually arguing "why his answers on the test are wrong and not theirs".
Ironically those who did very well on these test, since they didn't know how well others were doing, tended to underestimate their own competence. The researchers are calling this the "false consensus effect".
Now when those who actually scored well on the grammar test were shown the tests of the incompetent son-of-a-bitches in the study their assessment on how well they did immediately changed.
"Damn --- I guess I didn't do as bad as I fucking thought."
However this moment of clarity didn't happen with the incompetent motherfuckers even when looking at their low score.
Remember, they don't have the ability to assess themselves realistically. Even after seeing how poorly they did on the test the incompetent bastards still thought they were sweet.
Amazingly enough, some subjects Dr. Dunning said, "even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities."
In short, overconfidence is common among those that are incompetent. The vast majority of people rate themselves as "above average" on a wide array of abilities are erroneously thought to be covering up for a low self-image, when in reality, their insistence on their sweetness is due to the fact that Agent Smith and his cronies often fall behind on their basic maintenance duties and evidently pods needs to be rebooted from time to time.
This deficiency in "self-monitoring skills," the researchers said, helps explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes that are not funny and in general talking out of their ass.
The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that "he who knows best knows how little he knows." |
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