Empa­thy, com­pas­sion and grat­i­tude — these traits don’t usu­al­ly spring to mind when you think about Dar­win­ism and nat­ur­al selec­tion. No, your mind more imme­di­ate­ly drifts toward anti-social char­ac­ter­is­tics like com­pe­ti­tion, sur­vival of the fittest, and self­ish­ness (as in the “self­ish gene”). But above, on the first day of 2015, UC Berke­ley psy­chol­o­gist Dacher Kelt­ner reminds us that evo­lu­tion can bring out the best in us, and Dar­win rec­og­nized that. As Dar­win wrote in The Descent of Man, the strength­en­ing of our capac­i­ty for “sym­pa­thy” played a cen­tral role in human evo­lu­tion:

With mankind, self­ish­ness, expe­ri­ence, and imi­ta­tion, prob­a­bly add .… to the pow­er of sym­pa­thy; for we are led by the hope of receiv­ing good in return to per­form acts of sym­pa­thet­ic kind­ness to oth­ers; and sym­pa­thy is much strength­ened by habit. In how­ev­er com­plex a man­ner this feel­ing may have orig­i­nat­ed, as it is one of high impor­tance to all those ani­mals which aid and defend one anoth­er, it will have been increased through nat­ur­al selec­tion; for those com­mu­ni­ties, which includ­ed the great­est num­ber of the most sym­pa­thet­ic mem­bers, would flour­ish best, and rear the great­est num­ber of off­spring.

That’s not to say that we don’t have a dual nature — a capac­i­ty for being unsym­pa­thet­ic, self­ish, pow­er hun­gry. That’s some­thing Kelt­ner stud­ies too, and, indeed a while back, we told you about his stud­ies show­ing that the wealthy tend to be less sym­pa­thet­ic and giv­ing than the poor. You can find cours­es taught by Kelt­ner on Human Emo­tion and Human Hap­pi­ness in our col­lec­tion of Free Online Psy­chol­o­gy Cours­es, part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

via Devour

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I often say that, if you want to vast­ly over­es­ti­mate your own capa­bil­i­ties, you need only do one of two things: (a) get coked out of your mind, or (b) get behind the wheel of a car. But what if the prob­lem runs deep­er in human­i­ty than that? Indeed, what if our inabil­i­ty to per­ceive our own incom­pe­tence exact­ly match­es the degree of the incom­pe­tence itself? Now, none of us can do every­thing well, but we’ve all met peo­ple who, even well out­side of the con­texts of drugs or dri­ving, sim­ply can­not grasp the full extent of how much they can’t do well. “The prob­lem with peo­ple like this is that they are so stu­pid,” explains Mon­ty Python’s John Cleese in the clip above, “they have no idea how stu­pid they are.”

“In order to know how good you are at some­thing requires exact­ly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first place,” Cleese elab­o­rates, “which means — and this is ter­ri­bly fun­ny — that if you are absolute­ly no good at some­thing at all, then you lack exact­ly the skills you need to know that you are absolute­ly no good at it.” With that, he gives us an extreme­ly brief intro­duc­tion to the Dunning–Kruger effect, “a cog­ni­tive bias where­in unskilled indi­vid­u­als suf­fer from illu­so­ry supe­ri­or­i­ty, mis­tak­en­ly rat­ing their abil­i­ty much high­er than is accu­rate” owing to “a metacog­ni­tive inabil­i­ty of the unskilled to rec­og­nize their inep­ti­tude” (and, by the same token, of “high­ly skilled indi­vid­u­als to under­es­ti­mate their rel­a­tive com­pe­tence, erro­neous­ly assum­ing that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for oth­ers”).

The effect takes its name from Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty researchers Justin Kruger and David Dun­ning, the lat­ter of whom Cleese, who has spent time at Cor­nell as a long-term vis­it­ing pro­fes­sor (where he has, among oth­er projects, tak­en part in a talk about cre­ativ­i­ty, group dynam­ics and celebri­ty), counts as a friend. He orig­i­nal­ly invoked Dun­ning and Kruger’s “won­der­ful bit of research” in the video “John Cleese Con­sid­ers Your Futile Com­ments,” where he talks back to YouTube com­menters on Mon­ty Python videos — in this case, those who men­tioned the names of cer­tain polit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors beneath the 1970 sketch “Upper­class Twit of the Year.” “This explains not just Hol­ly­wood,” Cleese con­cludes, “but almost the entire­ty of Fox News.”

Those of you inter­est­ed in both cog­ni­tive phe­nom­e­na and con­ser­v­a­tive Amer­i­can polit­i­cal fig­ures will sure­ly have seen Gates of Heav­en and A Brief His­to­ry of Time doc­u­men­tar­i­an Errol Mor­ris’ most recent film The Unknown Known, a long-form con­ver­sa­tion with for­mer U.S. Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rums­feld. In the years before its release, Mor­ris wrote a five-part series for the New York Times called “The Anosog­nosic’s Dilem­ma,” fueled not just by his fas­ci­na­tion with Rums­feld but with his near-obses­sion over the Dun­ning-Kruger effect. In it, he actu­al­ly inter­views Dun­ning him­self, who sum­ma­rizes the issue thus: “We’re not very good at know­ing what we don’t know.”

Dun­ning even brings up the sub­ject of Rums­feld first, specif­i­cal­ly about his speech on “unknown unknowns” that gave Mor­ris’ movie its title. It goes some­thing like this: ‘There are things we know we know about ter­ror­ism. There are things we know we don’t know. And there are things that are unknown unknowns. We don’t know that we don’t know.’ He got a lot of grief for that. And I thought, ‘That’s the smartest and most mod­est thing I’ve heard in a year.’ ” When Mor­ris fol­lowed up, Dun­ning added that “the notion of unknown unknowns real­ly does res­onate with me, and per­haps the idea would res­onate with oth­er peo­ple if they knew that it orig­i­nal­ly came from the world of design and engi­neer­ing rather than Rums­feld.” Or maybe they could asso­ciate it with the Min­istry of Sil­ly Walks instead.

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via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese Explains the Brain — and the Plea­sures of DirecTV

John Cleese’s Phi­los­o­phy of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Cre­at­ing Oases for Child­like Play

Why You Do Your Best Think­ing In The Show­er: Cre­ativ­i­ty & the “Incu­ba­tion Peri­od”

Jorge Luis Borges: “Soc­cer is Pop­u­lar Because Stu­pid­i­ty is Pop­u­lar”

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.