You’ve no doubt heard of David Dunning and Justin Kruger.
You haven’t? Well, you needn’t feel too ignorant, because I’d had never heard of them either, until yesterday. But I now know practically everything about them. So buckle your seat belts, and prepare to become an instant expert on the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Back before 1999 (the year before the world came to a screeching halt, when everyone’s computer system melted down due to the Y2K Bug) no one knew that the people who are the most confident in their knowledge of a particular subject, are also most likely to be absolutely wrong about that same subject. In other words, the less you know, the more you think you know.
I know this sounds impossible, but bear with me.
Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger claimed to have discovered this “effect” in 1999. But my ex-wife Darlene actually discovered it many years earlier. However, Darlene didn’t have any interest in publishing a scientific paper about this particular psychological anomaly, so we’re stuck with conclusions drawn by two psychology professors from New York.
We all know a little bit about New York, I suspect. Enough to be dangerous. In my case, most everything I know about New York comes from watching Woody Allen movies. And “Friends”. People who live in New York are not, like, normal people. In fact, they seem a little bit clueless, but at the same time fond of making each other look ridiculous.
Professors Dunning and Kruger — from New York — were rather successful in publicizing their ideas, because you can now find numerous news stories, essays, and videos about the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”. (I’ve not yet discovered why they didn’t call it the “Kruger-Dunning Effect”. If I were Justin Kruger, I would be raising a fuss.)
The theory put forward in their 1999 peer-reviewed paper is that people who know very little about a topic or process are least capable of perceiving what they don’t know, and in that state of ignorance, they fall into the trap also known as the “Lake Wobegon Effect,” named after a town in Minnesota where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.
The frightening fact is this: almost all of us believe we are above average. But only about 70% of us actually are.
According to professors Dunning and Kruger, those of us who are most ardently confident that we’re experts on a given topic are those who know a little bit about the topic. Enough to be dangerous.
When you’re clueless, you are also clueless about how clueless you are. Like people from New York.
All of which brings us to the subject at hand. “Humor”.
Not a terribly dangerous subject, unless it falls into the wrong hands. (We wouldn’t want Joe Biden or Vladimir Putin writing a humor column, now would we?)
But professors D and K actually made a careful study of humor in their published paper, based on collected data in New York. Here’s a graph of what they found:
What the graph shows, according to professors D and K, is that the quartile of people who were least able to identify humor, or the lack thereof, in a sample story, still believed they knew a lot about comedy. That finding, by itself, should be pretty funny. But the two psychology professors took their research seriously — seriously enough to get a paper published in a prominent psychology journal not known for its sense of humor.
If we look carefully at the graph, most of the people in the study (these were college kids at Cornell University, in New York) thought they had a pretty good sense of humor… about 60%, among the kids who the professors later determined wouldn’t be able to recognize a joke if their lives depended on it… and about 70% among the kids who, the professors determined, could distinguish a good joke from a groaner.
What we will probably never know is: were any of the jokes used in this experiment actually funny? Because I’ve heard a lot of jokes that psychologists thought were hilarious, but no one else did. I’m thinking specifically about jokes pertaining to schizophrenia.
I will assume, in all humility, that the humor shared with the experimental subjects in this study were not my humor columns from the Daily Post, because I honestly believe, based on my extensive research into this subject, that psychologists have a terrible sense of humor, and that makes them the worst possible people to judge whether a particular group of college kids were suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Even if the professors have “PhD” after their names. (Which reportedly stands for “Post hole Digger”, ha ha ha.)
I think it goes without saying… if you’ve named a psychological aberration after yourself and your buddy, you are likely suffering from the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.