Are dumb people too dumb to know that they're dumb? Apparently so, according to research. From Life's Little Mysteries:
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, etcetera. 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."
Link (Photo: Shutterstock) | Learn more about the Dunning-Krueger Effect on Wikipedia
AND, the dumb/uneducated/ignorant are also at-the-ready to discount the observations of others as being impossible, because there is no way to be more highly-evolved than they are themselves.
Another thing:
At work, you can sometimes get a grip on someone's smarts & how well they did in school,
particularly in the Scientific Method bit of coursework,
because you'll draw out a procedure they just do. not. get.
-Literally like there is an entire block of logical framework that's Not There in them.
It's like trying to teach winning techniques for high-difficulty Sudoku to someone who does not understand the concept of things like: 1, 7, or 3.
.
I hate the feeling this type of stuff gives me; and also that its turning me into the impatient, judgmental, grumpy old man I swore I'd never become. :(
Life sucks.
...Now where was that string-triggered shotgun again?...
"dumb people don't know they're dumb, I know because I'm really smart."
http://www.livescience.com/18706-people-smart-democracy.html
So dumb people think they are smarter than they really are, and smart people are afraid they may be one of those dumb people suffering from DK.