The Person Who’s Best at Lying to You Is You
https://qz.com/1231534/the-person-whos- ... ou-is-you/
Some highlights...
In 1999, together with social psychologist Justin Kruger, Dunning identified the co-eponymous Dunning-Kruger effect: people who are incompetent and lack knowledge in a field tend to massively overestimate their abilities because, quite simply, they don’t know enough to recognize what they don’t know. So hugely unqualified people erroneously believe that they’re perfectly qualified.
Our false confidence in our own beliefs also deters us from asking for advice when appropriate – or to even know to whom to turn. “To recognize superior expertise would require people to have already a surfeit of expertise themselves,”
“We’re living in a world in which we’re awash with information and misinformation,” says Dunning. “We live in a post-truth world.”
There’s no quick fix to this, but there is a key step we could take to avoid being so willfully misinformed. We need to not only evaluate the evidence behind newly presented facts and stories, but evaluate our own capability of evaluating the evidence.