10/12/16

Just for fun:

The Lemon Juice Bandit

“In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras.” If it worked for invisible writing, then surely it must make his face invisible as well, right?

Fascinated by the story, psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning developed the notion that the less you know about how the world works, the more sure you are of your competence. 

Since the mid 1990s, their theory has been tested over a wide variety of tasks: humor, grammar, logic, geography, financial knowledge, biology and so on. The results hold. People who don’t know much think they know a lot. That’s because they don’t know what they don’t know. People who know a lot underestimate how much they know because they know how complicated things are.

Make of this what you will.

Here’s the original study.