When We Don’t Know That We Don’t Know
I have begun asking myself, why is it so hard to put aside our assumptions that we have the corner on the truth and the other guy is dead wrong. (besides ego of course.)
I just read an essay in the NY Times by Erroll Morris, the filmmaker who made “Fog of War” (interview of Robert McNamara after the war in Viet Nam) and “The Thin Blue Line” and some other great films. His thoughts are precipitated by a ludicrously botched bank robbery where a thief was told by someone he believed that by rubbing lemon on his face it would be hidden by the video cameras. It leads to the question, “Can you be too incompetent to understand just how incompetent you are?”
From NY Times
By Erroll Morris
June 20, 2010, 9:00 pm
The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is (Part 1)
Morris:
David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac. In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year.
As Dunning read through the article, a thought washed over him, an epiphany. 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 wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual competence. Within weeks, he and his graduate student, Justin Kruger, had organized a program of research. Their paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” was published in 1999.[3]
Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”
It doesn’t speak to the healthy optimism that we are all familiar with but blind optimism (magical thinking?) When people are incompetent they may not know that they are incompetent.
Here is Part II of the five in the series by Erroll Morris on anosognosia which continues with “digressions into Surrealism, hysteria and Proust.”
Part II takes a rather esoteric turn with forays into pathology in an attempt to explain magical thinking.
This is interesting to me because I think it implicates certainty vs. doubt (a theme from Fog of War). There are things we know that we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know. How can we as individuals be certain that we know enough about we do not know to be so sure we are correct in our thinking? Or something like that.
On the macro level I am thinking about the unrealistic thinking that underlies the war on terror and that would lead to the risks BP took. And I am even now thinking about all ideologies I am always suspicious of. And the utopias envisioned by people like Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot. And conspiracy theories.
Woodrow Wilson’s stroke and resulting anosognosia.
Exerpts of a discussion with V.S. Ramachandran, an expert on anosognosia:
Morris:
In [that] book, you suggest that anosognosia is not an underlying neurological condition; it’s about our lack of knowledge of something caused by an underlying neurological condition. About our not-knowing things that we should know — not knowing that we are not making any sense, not knowing that we are paralyzed, not knowing we are missing limbs.
Ramachandran:
What we call belief is not a monolithic thing; it has many layers.
Morris:
Do we live in a cloud of belief that is separate from the reality of our circumstances?
Ramachandran:
Absolutely, and overall, fortunately, it’s a positive cloud in most of us. If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we’d be terrified.
It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.
Morris goes on to say:
Ramachandran has used the notion of layered belief — the idea that some part of the brain can believe something and some other part of the brain can believe the opposite (or deny that belief) — to help explain anosognosia. In a 1996 paper [54], he speculated that the left and right hemispheres react differently when they are confronted with unexpected information. The left brain seeks to maintain continuity of belief, using denial, rationalization, confabulation and other tricks to keep one’s mental model of the world intact; the right brain, the “anomaly detector” or “devil’s advocate,” picks up on inconsistencies and challenges the left brain’s model in turn. When the right brain’s ability to detect anomalies and challenge the left is somehow damaged or lost (e.g., from a stroke), anosognosia results.
In Ramachandran’s account, then, we are treated to the spectacle of different parts of the brain — perhaps even different selves — arguing with one another.
We are overshadowed by a nimbus of ideas. There is our physical reality and then there is our conception of ourselves, our conception of self — one that is as powerful as, perhaps even more powerful than, the physical reality we inhabit. A version of self that can survive even the greatest bodily tragedies. We are creatures of our beliefs. This is at the heart of Ramachandran’s ideas about anosognosia — that the preservation of our fantasy selves demands that we often must deny our physical reality. Self-deception is not enough. Something stronger is needed. Confabulation triumphs over organic disease.
The hemiplegiac’s anosognosia is a stark example, but we all engage in the same basic process. But what are we to make of this? Is the glass half-full or half-empty? For Dunning, anosognosia masks our incompetence; for Ramachandran, it makes existence palatable, perhaps even possible.
Morris revisits the Lemon-Face Bandit and comes to the conclusion that alas, by definition one can never be aware of one’s own anosognosia. It takes someone else to point it out, and confronted with that diagnosis, the anosognosic will deny it.
Then he tells this story:
For years, I have had my own version of the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. In my version, God appears before Adam and Eve, and tells them that they have disobeyed Him. He admonishes them, and they will have to leave immediately. Everything will be completely grotesque, grim, ghastly and gruesome outside of Eden. God spares them no detail. Adam and Eve, both crestfallen and fearful, prepare to leave, but God, feeling perhaps a little guilty for the severity of his decision, looks at them and says, “Yes, things will be bad out there, but I’m giving you self-deception so you’ll never notice.”
Enter magical thinking and the belief of most of us that we are in the top quartile of mental competency. However Morris is optimistic enough to believe that if we get some really strong feedback and we are honest with ourselves, that we can re-evaluate our convictions and even change them to come to a closer alignment with objective reality.
Tags: Erroll Morris, Reflections, World Watching And Politics
Zoe
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