...or why the principle that "you can choose be stupid or you can be a jerk, but you can't be both at the same time" is so often honored in the breach.
Observation #4 of this Cracked article on "5 Things TV Writers Apparently Believe About Smart People" is "It's Okay To Be A Dick, As Long As You're Smart" - which, lord knows is why I spent all that becoming an expert in the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy...well, that and the fact that it is a "babe magnet -
Yes, the writers always set it up so that the good the character does outweighs the bad. In real life, on the other hand, the people who think they're geniuses overwhelmingly are absolutely not. Seriously -- it's science. The more you learn about a subject, the less likely you are to consider yourself an expert (because you have actual knowledge of how much you don't know). It's the guy who has read two books on the subject and worked in the field for a year who's more likely to decide he's graduated to the league of smug, condescending assholes. We have a feeling that soon the offices of the world will be full of sarcastic douchebags because they came through on one project and now believe they're the indispensible Dr. House of their operation.
Here's the linked Wiki article on the "Dunning - Kruger Effect":
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes.[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence. Competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. As Kruger and Dunning (1999) conclude, "Thus, 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" (p. 1127). [2]So, apparently, if you don't think you are an expert in something you may be an expert, unless, of course, you really aren't an expert in it. On the other hand, if you think that you are an expert in something, you most likely probably aren't.
The effect is not specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, and Dunning and Kruger cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt.[3] Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf[4] or driving a car.[3]
Got that?
Actually, this is surprisingly applicable to me this week. I had to explain to a person who had spent over a decade in a particular job that, yes, she really was an expert in that job despite her belief that she wasn't.
I've noticed that we all take our own knowledge as the baseline for what everyone knows, which is why "[c]ompetent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding." ["What? Everyone doesn't know about the Ostrogothic Kingdom of Italy???? How is that possible?"]
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