Sunday, February 08, 2009

My Favorite Effect


The Dunning-Kruger effect:

"The Dunning-Kruger effect is an example of cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it". They therefore suffer an illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average."


"Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd."


Your Republican Party: Always wrong but never in doubt.

8 comments:

Michael Hart said...

"The affliction of the ignorant is, they are ignorant of their ignorance."

PS: Mr. 'Glass thanks for your gracious mention of USojo the other day; your rambunctious minions dropped by in surprising numbers and clicked around our castle.

darkblack said...

Is this the pilot for America's Smallest Dink?

;>)

Anonymous said...

palin-dunning/plumber-kruger 2012! we had the decider; now try the declarers of stuff! important stuff! with gravitas and freeper appoval for all!

Anonymous said...

I know this is a bit OT, but Dunning-Kruger is actually one of the most amusing effects for the following reason. What Kruger and Dunning "discovered" is a statistical phenomenon known as "regression to the mean." However, because the two of them were statistically incompetent, they didn't realize this and went on to write a bunch of rather silly and, in retrospect, embarrassing papers. What makes this amusing (since the sub-field of social psych is full of people who know no stats) is how they, therefore, lived their own "theory." They didn't know enough stats, but thought that they did. Which is half of the K-D effect.

Too bad it's the lower half.

Anonymous said...

Henceforth the Repigs shall be known as the Dunning-Kruger Party (DKP).

Anonymous said...

Driftglass -- Man, oh man, do I love your ability to dig up the right ridiculous paradigm (aka: para-dig-em) for the task.

Let's hear it for scientific inquiry that finally quantifiably names the thing we always knew in our bones --

Teh Stoopids Always Think They're Smart.

Or, as author Barbara Kingsolver noted in "Animal Dreams" --

What we're talking about, basically, is self-diagnosed insanity and that gets complicated."

Now I can just call it Dunning-Druger and/or Average Republican.

'Course, "Scorn Fury Tit" ain't half bad either for a semantic label.

libhom said...

I still think the "Country First" slogan was funny. I wonder which country they were talking about, China? Saudi Arabia? It certainly wasn't the US.

Anonymous said...

libhom, "Country First" refers to the Confederate States of America