When You Don’t Know!
Remember that trick with invisible ink from your school days? If you wrote a message with lime juice on a piece of paper, and let it dry, it would be invisible. And then if you held a candle up to it, the heat would reveal the secret message. Remember that?
Well, it was a trick that fascinated kids and grown-ups around the world. Including a man called McArthur Wheeler. A man you’ve probably never heard of. But there’s a lesson he can teach us all. About ourselves.
McArthur had an idea. Since lime juice had the property of making things invisible, he reckoned he could put it to good use. He decided to rob a bank. And to make sure he would remain invisible, he smeared a lot of lime juice on his face, so the security cameras would not be able to capture his face. Emboldened by his genius idea, he stepped out one fine morning in Pittsburgh and robbed not one but two banks. Of course, he was fully prepared. Gun in one hand. And lots of lime juice on his face.
As the police looked at the bank’s CCTV footage, they could clearly see the face of the robber. He even seemed to be smiling into the camera. The cops put the footage out on the evening news on television, asking for leads if anyone could recognize the robber. And soon enough the cops were led to McArthur’s home.
When they told him he was being arrested for the bank robberies, he could hardly believe it. “But I wore the juice!” is what he apparently told the police. Medical tests confirmed he was not on drugs. He wasn’t delusional. He was just super-confident he had a fail-safe plan.
Ignorant, yet confident. Sounds like someone you know? Maybe there’s a bit of McArthur in all of us. The less we know about something, the more confident we are. You see it in the workplace. And on social media too.
When David Dunning – a professor of Psychology at Cornell University and Justin Kruger (then a Ph D student at Cornell) heard McArthur’s story, it led them to an underlying human trait. What’s now known as the Dunning–Kruger effect. It’s a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability or knowledge in a particular area tend to over-estimate their skill and ability in that area. When you don’t know, you tend to not know that you don’t know. Read that again.
Ah, the Dunning-Kruger effect. If you are looking for examples, think of bad drivers, who all think they are very good. Or that poor performer at work who is convinced he is a star – but it’s just that the boss doesn’t like him. And that leader who made stupid decisions, confident he had a can’t-go-wrong plan.
A good way to avoid the effect is to have a learning mindset. Keep learning. Get comfortable with saying “I don’t know”. Be willing to acknowledge you may be wrong. Being open to feedback can help too. Ask for feedback.
We can all think of people we know who behave like McArthur Wheeler did. But here’s what Dunning and Kruger have to say. if you are looking for examples of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the first place you must look at is a mirror.
Take a look. Today.
