We need to review this concept as individuals and as a culture or a country.
Somehow, each time when I mention to people the intriguing 2000 Ig Nobel prize winning paper “Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments” [1], they tend to send (non)verbal signals demonstrating a certain discomfort. Then I tone it down a bit, saying that one could argue about the set up of the experiment that led Kruger & Dunning to their conclusion. Now—well, based on material from a few years ago but I found out recently—I cannot honestly say that anymore either. A paper from the same authors, “Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence” [2], reports not only more of their experiments in different settings, but also different experiments by other researchers validating the basic tenet that ignorant and incompetent people do not realize they are incompetent but rather think more favourably of themselves—“tend to hold…
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