This is a study I found on the LiveScience website and it's really interesting. I will copy paste the content here but I think you should also visit their webpage.
"A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives
people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it
bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people
don't have a good enough sense of humor to tell.
This disconnect may be responsible for many of society's problems.
With more than a decade's worth of research, David Dunning, a
psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that humans find it
"intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don't know." Whether
an individual lacks competence in logical reasoning, emotional
intelligence, humor or even chess abilities, the person still tends to
rate his or her skills in that area as being above average.
Dunning and his colleague, Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now
at New York University, "have done a number of studies where we will
give people a test of some area of knowledge like logical reasoning, knowledge about STDs and
how to avoid them, emotional intelligence, etc. Then we determine
their scores, and basically just ask them how well they think they've
done," Dunning said. "We ask, 'what percentile will your performance
fall in?'"
The results are uniform across all the knowledge domains: People who
actually did well on the test tend to feel more confident about their
performance than people who didn't do well, but only slightly. Almost
everyone thinks they did better than average. "For people at the bottom
who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries.
The same pattern emerges in tests of people's ability to rate the
funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own
performance in a game of chess. "People at the bottom still think
they're outperforming other people.
It's not merely optimism, but rather that their total lack of expertise
renders them unable to recognize their deficiency. Even when Dunning
and his colleagues offer study participants a $100 reward if they can
rate themselves accurately, they cannot. "They're really trying to be
honest and impartial," he said.
If only we knew ourselves better. Dunning believes people's inability
to assess their own knowledge is the cause of many of society's ills,
including climate change denialism.
"Many people don't have training in science, and so they may very well
misunderstand the science. But because they don't have the knowledge to
evaluate it, they don't realize how off their evaluations might be," he
said.
Moreover, even if a person has come to a very logical conclusion about
whether climate change is real or not based on their evaluation of the
science, "they're really not in a position to evaluate the science."
Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend
not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from
co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.
The ultimate takeaway of the research is the reminder that you really
may not be as great as you think you are. And you might not be right
about the things you believe you're right about. And if you try to joke
about all this, you might not come off as funny as you think."
I think it kinda states the obvious but still LiveScience is one of the great websites you should visit.
