Cliché Research

News flash!

The NY Times reported last Tuesday, 1/18, that David Dunning of Cornell University and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, have determined that "… most incompetent people do not know that they are incompetent." They go on to conclude that: "One reason that the ignorant … tend to be blissfully self-assured … is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize incompetence."

In other words, if you’ll allow me to summarize, the inept are inept at realizing they’re inept.

Their research helped me understand why some of those who annoy me most seem so oblivious to their shortcomings. For example, there’s the witless boss who repeatedly tells stupid and offensive jokes during meetings, and the feckless politicians who consistently offer sound bites rather than sound proposals, and the software programmers who consider their tangled and illogical algorithms to be jobs well done. Dare I mention columnists with the inside track on truth? (Too close to home – better not.)

In any event, I was having a good time laughing at others until I learned that Dunning and Kruger had hired professional comedians to evaluate the bad jokes that the inept tend to repeat. As one who has stumbled through many jokes, I knew their investigation had gone too far. While I can enjoy, as much as the next person, scientific evidence that labels others – always others – as inept, to be critical of one’s sense of humor goes beyond the pale.

Torn from my revelry, I turned a more critical eye on their work and realized that they had gone to great lengths and expense to perform an experiment that merely confirmed at least 2500 years of common sense: You make a mistake when you know you did; you’re inept when you know you didn’t.

Where’s the Golden Fleece award when we need it?

As you may recall, every month between March 1975 and December 1988, Wisconsin Senator William Proxmire awarded the Golden Fleece to an activity that egregiously wasted taxpayer money. One award in 1978 went to the National Endowment for the Humanities for its $25,000 study of uncivil behavior on Virginia tennis courts. Though Dunning and Kruger may not have benefited from federal funds, the nature of their research falls to a level that Proxmire might have found noteworthy given that history and art certainly got there first.

Socrates, for example, was tried, sentenced to death, and became a martyr when he drank hemlock. But Meletus, Socrates’s accuser, is forever condemned to ineptitude by Socrates’s scorn: "It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance."

Shakespeare’s plays are rife with fools who belie their moniker by speaking truth to those who are fools. In "As You Like It", Touchstone speaks his famous line: "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."

But perhaps I’m being too hard on Dunning and Kruger. Since clichés embody received societal wisdom, it shouldn’t be surprising that psychological research frequently confirms a cliché. After all, we love clichés that are proverbs, because they’re true: the early bird gets the worm; nothing ventured, nothing gained; you can’t judge a book by its cover; etc.; etc.; ….

Clichés are critical to our society. We impart them to our children before and after they do something wrong. We repeat them over and over again until our child interrupts us by saying, "I know! I know!" We are satisfied he has truly heard us when he goes on to complete the cliché in his own words. While we know that he still doesn’t understand the cliché, we also know that at some point he’ll do something really stupid, really foolish, and he’ll remember the cliché and finally understand what it means.

Could it be that the inept in this study were not taught clichés by their parents? Now that would be news and would certainly explain why the inept don’t realize that: "A wise man knows he’s a fool."

In that case, fear not the Golden Fleece and charge onward Dunning, Kruger and phalanxes of psychological workers to the study of clichés in parenting. In particular, study "People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones" and my favorite, because I really do want to believe that the inept who do me wrong get what they deserve, "What goes around comes around."