On April 19, 1995, a man robbed two banks while his face was covered with lemon juice. This guy had read somewhere about how the chemical properties of lemon juice can act as an invisible ink. As good as National Treasure was, maybe don’t take Nicholas Cage movies so seriously...
Anyway, the guy believed that dousing his face in lemon juice would make him invisible to the surveillance cameras. Spoiler: he got caught.
This odd event inspired two social psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, to study the relationship between competence and confidence. The result of the study was basically this: people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. In other words, if you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent. This became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect (as seen in the photo above).
When it comes to politics, work, relationships, or just good ol’ day-to-day common sense, I believe over-confidence is the largest issue facing our society today. If we went through life every day thinking that we knew everything, we would never learn anything new.
Have you ever been around a small child who has just learned how to talk? What’s the word they like to say the most?
“Why?”
Human beings are naturally very curious creatures and as kids, before society has stripped away that curiosity, we love to learn about new things.
If you’re washing the dishes and your kid asks, “why are you doing that?”
You would reply, “because they’re dirty and they need to be cleaned.”
“Why?”
“Because they have germs on them and we don’t want germs.”
“Why?”
“Because germs can hurt us and make us sick.”
“Why?”
I don’t need to keep going, you get the idea. Kids subconsciously know that they don’t know a whole lot, so they seek more information. Why can't we do the same?
While it may seem like a flex to ‘know everything’, it’s much more impressive when we can admit that we don’t know everything. We must put our egos aside and accept our ignorance. We must be humble in knowing that we can never be certain about anything and we can never know everything.
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