In 1999, two social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Krueger published a seminal paper on a cognitive bias that can affect nearly everyone.

Since the paper was published, it has given a name to something which most people have recognized

and at times may have been guilty of themselves. However, most people who are

familiar with the effect know only half the story. Learn more about the Dunning-Kruger effect, what it is, and how to avoid it, on this episode of

Everything Everywhere Daily. This entire episode has its genesis in a single paper written in 1999 in the Journal of Economic Psychology.

The paper was written by David Dunning of Cornell University and his then graduate student Justin

Krueger.

The paper was titled Unskilled and Unaware of it, how difficulties in recognizing one's

own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

The paper starts with an interesting story about a bank robbery.

On January 6, 1995, would-be bank robbers, MacArthur Wheeler, and Clifton Earl Johnson walked into two banks in the middle of the day and robbed them at gunpoint, walking away with $5,200.

Neither robber appeared to have made any attempt at concealing their identity.

The entire robbery was caught by a surveillance camera.

The footage was later shown on the nightly news, and both men were easily caught within an hour.

When they were arrested, MacArthur Wheeler reportedly said, quote,

but I wore the lemon juice. I wore the lemon juice. It seemed that the robbers

thought that if they rubbed lemon juice on their faces,

it would prevent their images from being captured on camera,

because lemon juice is how you make invisible ink.

And believe it or not, the robbers were not from Florida, but rather were from Pittsburgh.

The story is not meant to illustrate a couple of guys who did something stupid.

It was that they knew so little and they were confident that what they were doing was going to work.

...