Fooling at least one person all the time

Kruger, Dunning (1999): "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments", Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 77(6): 1121-1134 -- Abstract online, payment required for fulltext

Kruger and Dunning state something that isn't self-evident enough: "People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains" Then they measure it: "participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic [whose] scores put them in the 12th percentile […] estimated themselves to be in the 62nd" But of course. (via)

Posted 4-Mar-05. Update: a pdf of the paper is now available online (Google cache has the html) as part of a feature by the American Psychological Association, and Dunning-Kruger syndrome is now in Wikipedia.

[Published: 08-Jul-06 | Permalink | Category: Writ]

This could be the peer-reviewed scientific basis for the excellent policy of fleeing immediately anyone who states that they have a good sense of humour, imagination, or fashion sense.

(These things are always show-not-tell[7].)

Quantifying humour

I wondered who validates the tests of "humour"? Here's a description of one such test:

Participants […] were asked to complete three separate humor tests: appreciation of humorous verbal statements; joke and story completion; and nonverbal cartoon appreciation.

In the first test, participants were presented with 21 humorous and seven neutral written statements and asked to pick out the humorous ones. Examples of humor statements included: (i) Sign in a tailor shop -- "Please have a fit upstairs"; and (ii) Sign in a hotel -- "Guests are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid". An example of a neutral statement included: (i) Sign in a hotel -- "Visitors are requested to turn off the lights when they leave the room".

In the second test, participants were asked to select the correct punch lines for 16 incomplete joke stems. Each joke stem had four different endings of which only one was the correct (humorous) punch line. The four different endings included the funny correct ending (FC), the logical straightforward ending (SF), the slapstick humorous non sequitur ending (HNS), and the unrelated non sequitur (UNS). For example: The neighbor approached Mr. Smith at noon on Sunday and inquired, "Say Smith, are you using your lawnmower this afternoon?" "Yes I am," Smith replied warily. Then the neighbor answered -- "Fine, you won't be wanting your golf clubs, I'll just borrow them" (FC); "Oops!" as the rake he walked on barely missed his face (HNS); "Oh well, can I borrow it when you're done, then?" (SF); and "The birds are always eating my grass seed" (UNS).

In the third test, participants looked at 10 different cartoon drawings. Each cartoon consisted of a series of four similar drawings, only one of which had a funny detail. Participants were asked to select the correct funny version.

(source)

So I guess the answer to my question is: er, nobody.

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