Wednesday, December 06, 2006
What?
Just a random juxtaposition...really...
No link for the first one (Times "Select").
No link for the first one (Times "Select").
- January 18, 2000
Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss
By ERICA GOODE
There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is haunted by the fear he might be one of them.
Dr. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent.
On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
''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.
In a series of studies, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning tested their theory of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most likely to ''grossly overestimate'' how well they had performed.
Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the study, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning found, were likely to underestimate their own competence.
When high scoring subjects were asked to ''grade'' the grammar tests of their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others; some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own abilities.
''Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in others,'' the researchers concluded.
The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's assertion that ''he who knows best knows how little he knows.''
...Dr. Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated that there were many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their competency, and not be aware of it.
In some cases, Dr. Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one's own inability is inevitable: ''In a golf game, when your ball is heading into the woods, you know you're incompetent,'' he said.
But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from blurting out ''You stink!'' -- truthful though this assessment may be.
- Bush's certainty rallies the faithful
by Walter Shapiro
COLUMBUS -- Like a Broadway show racing through its last out-of-town tryout on its way to New York, George W. Bush swooped into Columbus on Wednesday afternoon for a final stump speech before he plays Madison Square Garden. Little that the president said was new or provided fresh clues about the shape of his convention address Thursday night. But watching Bush among committed Main Street Republicans underscored the nature of his political appeal. The Columbus rally for Bush had an aggressive, conservative tenor that has not been visible at most convention events.
The rally in Columbus was a chance to ponder a question that seems obvious and yet a bit elusive: What, in political terms, is Bushism? For all the flag-waving comparisons to Ronald Reagan, there is a different tenor to the president's conservatism. And yet unlike the zigzag administration of George H.W. Bush and the cynical pragmatism of Richard Nixon, this President Bush does not fit the mold of other Republican presidents.
This is not the moment to review the governing record of the president or to muse on Bush's often amnesiac approach to his 2000 campaign pledge to be "a uniter not a divider." Rather the goal is to try to understand the rapturous enthusiasm that Bush, the political leader, inspires among the faithful.
The central appeal of Bushism is the president's unwavering (and his critics would say unreflective) certainty. Time and again, Bush asserts as he did in Columbus, "America will continue to lead the world with confidence and moral clarity." The president also used the line, "If America shows uncertainty or weakness in this decade, the world will drift toward tragedy."
This steadfast resolve, rarely accompanied by visible second thoughts, resonates with voters who regard nuanced complexity as synonymous with dithering inaction. It is the moralism that Bush radiated back when he routinely described al-Qaeda as the "evil-doers." Bush speaks to the belief that we are a nation blessed with both liberty and a big-hearted idealism unique in human history.
Bush, even more than most candidates, avoids seeing contradictions. His longtime ties with Enron did not prevent him from declaring in Michigan, "It is now clear that we will not tolerate dishonesty in the boardrooms of America." The same unapologetic style prompts Bush to shy away from any extended discussion of the faulty intelligence that convinced him that Saddam Hussein possessed a fearsome arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. As he did in Columbus, Bush repeatedly depicts the decision to invade Iraq as a stark choice to either "accept the word of a madman" or "defend America."
What Bush offers is a curious amalgam of moral clarity and political pragmatism, all delivered with the oratorical passion of a true believer.
