Oh.
You know how the person at the dinner table who appears to know the least about tennis spends a solid portion of the night explaining tennis to everyone else? Among those at the table might be a) a tennis coach b) someone who has written a book about tennis and c) Roger Federer, but none of that matters because Rick over here HAS SOME THOUGHTS.
Yes, well, the same principle applies to the workplace.
Sophia is very bad at her job.
Appalling, in fact.
She’s been working at the company for six years and doesn’t know how to work the computer system yet. She’s been the subject of so many complaints that no one records them anymore. The person doing their performance review hasn’t slept since their last performance review and everyone else is working 10 extra hours a week to undo what she spends her day doing.
But none of that is the biggest problem.
No. The issue is that Sophia thinks she’s f*cking Elon Musk.
If you asked Sophia how things are going, she would exclaim, “Great!” And it’s not a front. She just genuinely thinks she is really, very good at what she does.
When you have a problem at work, she’s the first person to offer some advice. She looks at you with an expression of sympathy – not empathy – because she genuinely has no idea what it feels like to think you might be a little bit bad at your job.
You see, Sophia isn’t the exception. She’s the rule.
Her apparent disconnect between thinking she knows things and actually knowing things, is explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect, a well documented psychological phenomenon.
In their 1999 paper, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, tested Greek philosopher Socrates’ theory that “the only true wisdom is knowing you know nothing.”
In other words, the more you know… the more you realise you don’t know. And the less you know, the more you think you know.
Or simply: Idiots don’t know they’re idiots. Smart people think they’re idiots. And that’s why Donald Trump.
The researchers found, over and over again, that people who did very badly on a test, rated themselves as highly knowledgeable. They believed themselves to be sometimes as much as 60 per cent more competent than they actually were.
Interestingly, searches for the Dunning Kruger effect spiked in late 2015 – just as a man named Donald Trump began campaigning for president.
They’ve not dropped since.
What a coincidence.
President Trump will be the first to tell you how smart he is, and how great his ‘big words’ are, in a tweet that is simultaneously littered with typos.
It’s exactly the same as the co-worker who declares how accomplished they are, while the office literally burns behind them.
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Dunning Kruger, and others who continued the research, found that while people at the bottom did over estimate their accomplishments and the people at the top underestimated theirs, the people at the bottom still put themselves below the top people. Basically everyone pushed themselves towards average.
So Trump is something a bit different. Delusional would be closer I'd wager.
I'm not sure where this quote came from, but I remember it well enough to paraphrase.
A smart person is able to appear stupid, but a stupid person can never appear to be smart.
I dunno' about that james b.
It seems if you can spin enough BS it can carry you pretty far for 90% of people.
I think stupid people can appear smart, especially to other stupid people, but I like the concept.
I'd go a bit different and say you can fool some of the people all the time and all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time.
Oh right. So we're going with the Trump is dumb trope again.
Explain to me please how if he's so stupid, how he managed to build a billion dollar business empire, produce a very popular, long running reality TV show, beat out a dozen qualified politicians to become the Republican nominee for President, and then beat "the most qualified Presidential candidate ever" to become the President.
There are many things that Trump can be criticized for and you can call him a lot of things, but a truly stupid person could never have achieved the things he's achieved.
For every business success he has had, he has had 5 failures. He was literally handed his father's fortune and lost it...
He won because much like himself, everyone who voted for him is an idiot.
You are also forgetting Clinton got 2 million more votes. The American political system is shocking and allows for the popular vote to lose.
Ironic after an article like this a person can comment on something that they clearly know nothing about...
A series of unfortunate events
It's an interesting question as to whether he's truly bad at this as he seems, or whether he's actually very clever in the way he's managed the exploit the fears and prejudices of others for his own personal gain. I don't think he expected to actually win the presidency, and the challenge of actually governing is progressively getting further and further away from his ability to bluster, distract, and lie his way out of things. The most surprising thing to me is how supine the GOP establishment have been about this: they're the ones who are going to have to live with the consequences long after Trump is gone.
And THAT'S the reason Trump won the election. Hillary Clinton's continual calling of conservatives 'a basket of deplorables' and other epithets turned many away from her. To classify someone who doesn't share your political opinion as an 'idiot' shows a deep level of stupidity, not to say arrogance.
I have friends with wildly divergent points of view on many subjects. Unlike those on the left, we revel in our differences and discuss things with honesty and respect. Personal vilification is a tool used by those who are insecure in their position and want to shut down debate.