Lemon Juice, Invisibility and Cognitive Distortion

Does rubbing your face with lemon juice make you invisible to video cameras?  It’s the Anosognosic Dilemma. How can we ever know something is wrong if we don’t know what that something is? If I don’t know. And I know that I don’t know it. That’s fine. Because I do know about it. But what about the unknown unknowns? Just came across a great discussion between filmaker Errol Morris and Philosopher David Dunning from the New York Times this past summer. The discussions details a bank robber from a news article:

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.  Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

Dunning believes if Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity. Dunning wonders whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence.  Thus, when we try something we are not capable of or truly do not understand, then we suffer a dual burden: Not only do we reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but our incompetence robs us of the ability to realize it.  Instead, like that bank robber covered in lemon juice, we are left with the erroneous impression we are doing just fine…W now know it as  the Dunning-Kruger effect, a form of cognitive distortion and the tendency of incompetent people, to overestimate their own abilities…