Lara Boffa, Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando, the Labour government and the Dunning-Kruger effect

The fascinating thing about the Labour Party, and the government it has formed, is that both are packed with people who think that anybody can do any job, and that no special skills are required, which means that they must obviously be fit for purpose and very capable. Both government and party are weighed down with individuals who suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is when they are too stupid/incompetent/convinced of their own superiority to understand just how unfit for purpose they are, and how they do not have what is required for the job, not by a long shot.

Justin Kruger and David Dunning at Cornell University were the first to study this phenomenon, in 1999, and they attributed it to the metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognise their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately.

There is a corollary to this research: that highly skilled individuals often do the opposite of what unskilled people do, and UNDERESTIMATE their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.

“The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others,” they wrote.

I would go one further and say that the unskilled and incompetent who are unable to assess their own true ineptitude and unsuitability for the job are also liable to be unable to assess the true ineptitude and unsuitability of those for whom they vote and put into positions of power, and this is also why they cannot understand how shocking some of this government’s appointments and choices have been.

Read Dunning and Kruger’s paper here.

Jeffrey Pullicino Orlando and Lara Boffa at the Malta Council for Science and Technology: the Dunning-Kruger effect.