March 26, 2021 • 33 mins
The hijackers of flight 961 wanted its pilot to fly them to Australia - and wouldn't listen to his pleas that there simply wasn't enough fuel for the mammoth trip. What would cause them to totally disregard the advice of an expert when the stakes were so very high? The Dunning Kruger effect.
But being too stupid to recognise the limits of your knowledge isn't confined to such prize idiots - it's something we are all guilty of at times and has huge implications for society.
Starring Jeffrey Wright (Hunger Games, Westworld, and the Bond films) as Ethiopian Airlines captain Leul Abate.
Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated hijacking. Three somewhat drunk
young men charged into the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airline's
(00:37):
plane and grabbed a fireman's axe from the wall. Everybody
should be seated, I herbim bump. They beat up the
first officer and pushed him out of the flight deck,
then made their demands. The pilot, forty two year old
Leel Abata, was an Ethiopian Airlines veteran. He had dealt
(00:57):
with two previous hijackings. Both times he had eventually managed
to talk the hijackers into giving themselves up. Both times,
nobody had been hurt. This new hijacking was alarming, but
perhaps manageable. So outnumbered three to one in the cockpit,
(01:18):
Laoll played it cool. He assumed the hijackers were not
interested in murder. This was five years before nine eleven.
Laoll reckoned the men who took over his plane wanted
money or attention, or maybe they were desperate to be
taken somewhere, and he was right. This was a simple
old school hijacking. The hijackers just wanted the plane to reroute.
(01:42):
It was November the twenty third, nineteen ninety six. The plane,
a Boeing seven sixty seven, was flying from the capital
of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, to the capital of Kenya, Nairobi,
and the hijackers wanted to go somewhere else, namely Australia.
There was just one problem. There wasn't the slightest chance
(02:06):
that they could fly the distance. Ethiope In Airlines Flight
nine six one was in the middle of a Dunning
Kruger hijack. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales.
(02:43):
This tale is about the Dunning Kruger effect, what it is,
how it became famous, and what we get wrong about it.
But we should probably start by explaining what the Dunning
Kruger effect is, and for that we have to start
with a gentleman named MacArthur Wheeler. You wouldn't have thought
you'd have much trouble picking mister Wheeler out of a lineup.
(03:05):
He was five ft six and two hundred and seventy pounds,
the height of a jockey and the weight of a linebacker.
But when detectives knocked on his door in the early
hours of the twentieth of April nineteen ninety five and
arrested him on suspicion of carrying out two bank robberies
in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He was astonished, but I
(03:28):
wore the lemon juice. OW wore the lemon juice, a
perplexed Wheeler declared to the equally perplexed detectives. MacArthur Wheeler
was destined to be convicted in court. He was also
destined to become a minor legend in the field of
behavioral science, as an inspiration for two academic psychologists, David
(03:51):
Dunning and Justin Krueger. When David Dunning read about MacArthur Wheeler,
he thought, here is an incompetence so fascinating, so profound,
as to be worthy of close study. It turns out
that mister Wheeler had been told that squeezing lemon juice
on his face would render him invisible to security cameras
(04:13):
and thus able to rob banks with impunity. Exactly where
this theory came from is unclear. Maybe it's because lemon
juice can be used to make invisible ink. Maybe it's
because well, I don't know. I just don't know. But
MacArthur Wheeler didn't just take some guy's word for it.
(04:34):
That would be just plain stupid, wouldn't it. No, he
decided to test the idea. He bathed his face in
lemon juice, and then he pointed a polaroid camera at
his stinging face, with his blinded eyes streaming tears through
closed lids, and took a test selfie. And you know what,
he wasn't in the shot. The juice worked. Now You
(04:58):
or I might think maybe he didn't give the photograph
time to develop, or maybe blinded by the juice, he
pointed the camera at a blank wall rather than at
his own face. But it did not seem to have
occurred to MacArthur Wheeler that anything might be amiss. One
thing is clear enough, Wheeler was no better at photography
(05:18):
than he was at robbing banks. But beyond this quite
riveting ineptitude. Why was the academic researcher David Dunning so
intrigued by the case of MacArthur Wheeler. It's because the
thing about MacArthur Wheeler was not just that he was
an incompetent bank robber, but that he had no idea
(05:39):
that he was an incompetent bank robber, and people who
did not know they were incompetent were just the kind
of people that David Dunning and Justin Krueger had begun
to study. Dunning and Krueger set tests of competence to
groups of undergraduates. Then they asked them how they stacked
up to others in the group. For example, were they
(06:01):
better able than other students to distinguish funny from unfunny jokes.
Let's hear two of the jokes. Have a think about
which one of him is funny? Joke one, question what
is as big as a man but weighs nothing? Answer
his shadow or joke Two. If a kid asks where
(06:22):
rain comes from, I think a cute think to tell
him is God is crying. And if he asks why
God is crying, another cute think to tell him is
probably because of something you did. Now, I don't need
to tell you that. The first joke is not really
a joke at all. It's more of a riddle. Riddles
aren't usually funny, and we have a special name for
(06:42):
riddles that are funny. We call them jokes. The second
joke is written by Jack Handy, one of the funniest
men in the world, and was highly rated by a
panel of professional comedians Now, since I agree that joke
two is funnier, I guess that means I'm pretty good
at recognizing what's funny. But when Dunning and Krueger asked
(07:03):
their experimental subjects exactly that question, how good is your
ability to recognize what's funny? They found something interesting. The
students had no idea, or, to be more precise, all
the students thought they were pretty good. Some were right,
and some weren't. Those who had no sense of humor
(07:26):
just didn't realize it. But humor was just one of
the things that Dunning and Kruger tested. They also gave
tests of logical reasoning and of grammar. For grammar, they
found the same story as for humor. For logic, Dunning
and Kruger found something even more striking here. The good
but not great students realized they were good but not great.
(07:49):
But there were two groups of students who thought they
were outstanding logicians, the ones who'd done very well and
the ones who'd done very badly, Ladies and gentlemen. This
is the Dunning Kruger effect. Cautionary tails will return in
(08:12):
a moment. On flight nine six one, things aren't going well.
The hijackers remember have beaten up the co pilot, whose
(08:32):
name is Jonas Mercuria. They're threatening Layola Bata, the pilot,
and they're demanding that he fly them thousands of miles
to Australia. The hijackers are a strange bunch. They claim
they're a group of eleven. Maybe there are only three
of them on the flight deck with Layol. They're young,
in their mid twenties, clean shaven, they're nervous. One of
(08:56):
them has a stocking cap pulled down over his face
to conceal his features, but the other two haven't bothered,
so go figure. The leader has grabbed the public address system.
He tells passengers, speaking in the Ethiopian language, AM harrick,
we skipped from prison. Yeah, against the government. We are
(09:17):
hijacking the Blint. We have an explosive. If anybody morse,
we'll exploded. Le can't actually see an explosive. One of
the hijackers has grabbed a little fire axe from where
it's been stowed in the cockpit. That makes some sense
as an improvised weapon, although it also suggests he didn't
manage to smuggle a weapon on board. He also has
(09:39):
a bottle of whiskey that he's looted from the duty
free cart. A second hijacker has a fire extinguisher, again
opportunistically grabbed from stowage and the cockpit. That makes a
lot less sense. The third man has a glove. He says,
there's a bomb in the glove. Okay. In his other
(10:00):
hand he's got well, another bottle of stolen whiskey. The
men are not easy to understand. They're drunk and what
demanding seems crazy. But there are three of them and
there's only one of leol. So he's trying to do
what they tell him to do. Dick us to Australia.
Take the plane to Australia. There is not enough fuel
(10:22):
to go to Australia. Don't lay to us. They're smacking
him around, punching him, threatening him with the axe and
with a now broken whiskey bottle. There is not enough
fuel to go to Australia. The plane is only fuel
to fly to Niadobe. If you want to go to Australia,
we have to refuel. We can land at Mombassa and refuel.
Stop laying. We know you're lying. Take us to Australia.
(10:45):
We are not landing in Mombassa. LAOL is already trying
to work out how to get a message to Mombassa Airport,
but the hijackers have other ideas. We need to refuel ah.
We know the plane can fly for eleven hours without refueling.
(11:05):
This plane does not have enough fuel for that. Stop laying.
We know you're lying. We read this in your own magazine.
It's true. The in flight magazine of Ethiopian Airlines was
called Salamta. It still is, and the magazine did indeed
have one of those about our aircraft sections. Ethiopian Airlines
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whilst the very first airline in the world to place
an order for the extended range version of the Bowing
seven sixty seven, so I imagine they were pretty keen
to boast about it. But just because a fully fueled
extended range Bowing seven sixty seven er could, in theory
get you from Addis Ababa to Australia six thousand miles
(11:50):
or so away, well it didn't mean that this particular
plane fueled for a short hop to Nairobi could make it,
because it couldn't. This plane has only a light fuel load.
We must land in Mumbasa. Dodds lay we've done our
zech they really had. Later police would raid the hijackers
(12:11):
hideout in Addis, they'd find a copy of salam To magazine,
and true enough, the Boeing seven sixty seven's maximum flight
time was underlined. These drunk young men thought they were
so smart that they had no idea how dumb they
really were. For Dunning Kruger hijack, Dunning and Krueger wrote
(12:38):
up their findings in a nineteen ninety nine research paper
titled Unskilled and Unaware of It. It's fun to read.
They even begin with the story of MacArthur Wheeler. Their
study was noticed in the cloisters of academia, but didn't
make much impression beyond them, not at first anyway. I
tracked Google searches for Dunning Kruger effect since two thousand
(13:01):
and four, and by way of comparison, I picked another
concept from social science, the tipping point, made famous by
Malcolm Gladwell himself in his first book, which of course
you should read, Ah, tim, what a sweet thing to say,
Not at all. In two thousand and four, nobody was
searching for Dunning Krueger. Loads of people were searching for
(13:24):
the tipping point. Gradually Over time, the Dunning Kruger effect
started to attract some attention. It first seemed to enter
the popular consciousness around the summer of twenty ten, and
it grew and grew. For a few years. It was
neck and neck with the tipping point, which, remember is
one of the most popular of all popularizations of an
(13:47):
idea in social science. Then in the summer of twenty sixteen,
interest in Dunning Krueger really starts to searge. You know,
all of my life, I've heard that a truly successful person,
a really really successful person, cannot run for public offers.
The US presidential election campaign is building. People are talking
(14:11):
about Donald Trump as the Dunning Kruger candidate, the presidential
hopeful who's so dumb he doesn't know how dumb he is.
But maybe Trump doesn't much care about that, because, of
course he wins, I'm a very stable genius. And the
Dunning Kruger effect is more famous now than it's ever been.
It's become a straight up insult now, a highbrow way
(14:34):
to accuse someone of the stupidest stupidity of all, to
accuse someone of being such an idiot they don't even
know they're an idiot. Suddenly we're all living in a
dunning Kruger world. We're surrounded by more ROMs who don't
know their more ROMs, and like Pilot Naoula Bata, we're outnumbered.
(14:57):
MacArthur Wheeler was by no means the only incompetent bank robber.
One Florida gentleman handed a bank cashier in Delray Beach
a misspelled note which read a berm, I can blow
you sky high. The note was passed around the bank staff,
most of whom were reduced to hysterics foiled, the humiliated
(15:20):
thief ran away. You don't have to go very far
to find collections of these bungling incompetence online, but my
favorite source is an old book by the British writer
Nigel Blundell, called the World's Most Daring Ragabonds and Villains.
Some of Blundell's protagonists are smart and ruthless. Some of
(15:40):
them are so creative and daring as to deserve the
title of criminal mastermind, but some of them not so much.
There was the Texas bank robber. This is a sticker.
The cashier, just twenty years old, replied, you're in the
wrong line. Please wait over there. He tamely obeyed and
(16:02):
was still in the line when the police arrived. Burglars
offer equally compelling examples of incompetence. One French gentleman robbed
the home of a Parisian antique dealer, having first opted
to don a suit of fifteenth century armor. The plan was,
(16:23):
I think, to appear more intimidating. While some men might
have quailed at the sight and indeed the clattering sound
of a suit of armor climbing the stairs in the
middle of the night, the quick witted homeowner shoved the
intruder down the stairs and then pinned him by pushing
a heavy antique sideboard over on him. When the police arrived,
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they found that the armor had been sufficiently dented as
to make it impossible to easily remove, so the miscreant
had to be fed through his visor until an armorer
could be found. Another burglar tried to squeeze through a
skylight into a store in the middle of the night.
Finding that his clothes were bunching up and getting in
(17:07):
the way, he removed them, dropped them through the skylight,
then tried to squirm through after them, as he still
couldn't quite fit, leaving his clothes inside the store, and
the burglar buck naked on the roof. By the way,
I should tell you that while I have sources for
(17:29):
the other stories, the one about the naked burglar and
the skylight is one I merely recall reading decades ago,
and all I really remember is that I laughed until
I cried. So I googled around trying to find more details,
and instead I found a much more recent example of
a naked burglar trapped in a ventilation shaft in Milwaukee,
(17:52):
again because he felt he would make more progress through
a narrow space without his garments. I am forced to
conclude that not only did this actually happen, it happened twice.
The idiocy isn't always in the crime itself, as one
criminal suspect proved. He was accused of snatching a purse
(18:14):
at a shopping center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in October nineteen
seventy six. Unwisely, he decided to act as his own
defense lawyer. Cross examining the victim, he asked, did you
get a good look at my face when I took
your purse? The entire court burst out laughing, including the
robbery victim. If I'd been the one that was there.
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He was promptly found guilty. The spectacular ineptitude of mister
Lemon Juice MacArthur Wheeler may have inspired Dunning and Krueger,
but he is not alone. Cautionary tales will return in
a minute. I love a good story about stupid people
(19:10):
doing stupid things, but I worry that perhaps we're missing
something very important about the Dunning Kruger effect. In eighteen
ninety six, an Austrian doctor named Gabriel Anton stood up
at a medical conference to discuss some curious cases in
what we would now call neuroscience. Anton is remembered partly
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in the medical eponym Anton Babinski syndrome. People who suffer
from Anton Babinsky syndrome are blind, but that's not what's
strange about this condition. Now. What's strange about people with
Anton Babinski syndrome is that they don't realize that they
can't see. Doctor Anton had other examples. There was a
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gentleman who was quite deaf and also quite unaware that
he was deaf. He knew that he struggled in conversation,
but his explanations didn't make much sense. For example, he
blamed background noise for the fact that he couldn't hear
what people were saying to him. He'd ask people questions
and didn't seem too worried by the fact that he
(20:15):
never perceived their answers. Such cases are typically the result
of damage to the brain itself, resulting in a lack
of self insight that strains imagination. They're very rare and
very strange. But I worry that we've come to think
of the Dunning Kruger effect as a bit like the
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Anton Babinski syndrome, that it's a special kind of disability
that afflicts a distinct class of clueless idiot, like the
hapless bank robber, that since you and I, dear listener,
are not clueless, we are therefore thankfully immune. But Dunning
Kruger isn't like that at all. Rather, their research paper,
(20:58):
Unskilled and Unaware of It describes a common truth about
the way we think. We all lack self insight some
of the time, and in particular, when we've strayed beyond
our sphere of competence, we may lack the competence to
know it. The Dunning Kruger effect isn't just about stupid
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people doing stupid things. It's about clever people doing stupid
things too, and those clever people may include you and me.
One example that struck me was the sudden popularity of
me too on social media, more than a decade after
being introduced by the activist Tarana Burke. Me too is
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often described as a movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment,
which of course it is, but think about what me
too is really doing. It all went big in late
twenty seventeen when the actor Alissa Milano encouraged women to
post me too if they had suffered sexual harassment or assault.
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She wrote, we might give people a sense of the
magnitude of the problem. She could have written it's time
that abusers face consequences, or it's time to stop blaming
women for their own harassment, but she focused like a
laser on a dunning Kruger issue. Men who thought of
themselves as decent, considerate, nice guys who had no idea
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what many women were having to deal with. I'd put
myself squarely in that category. I don't think I'm stupid.
I don't think lemon juice makes me invisible to cameras.
But on this point, until Me Too, I didn't begin
to get it, and that I think was Milano's point.
Men need to understand how often this is happening to
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the women around them. They don't know what they don't know.
David Dunning found that he had given birth to an
academic idea that became a cultural touch point. But Professor
Dunning has spent the last few years running around telling
people their misunderstanding the effect. The first rule of the
Dunning Kruger Club, he told the website Vox, is you
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don't know you remember, and while we're all members, we
drop in and out of the clubhouse without knowing it.
As David Dunning wants put it, there's a borderline between
what we know and what we don't know. And it's
so easy to cross over that borderline. One moment we
know what we're doing. The next moment we've strolled into
the Dunning Kruger Clubhouse, and we still think we know
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what we're doing, but we don't. Any of us can
step over that threshold at any moment, and like Wiley
coyote walking over a cliff and standing suspended in mid air,
it might take a while before we realize that we've
wandered away from solid ground. Sometimes we know we're unskilled
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or ignorant. I can't play the flute, and I know
I can't. But very often the failure of skill or
knowledge goes hand in hand with a failure of self insight.
We don't know what we don't know. Dunning Kruger isn't
about stupidity. It's about blind spots. Everyone has blind spots.
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And the thing about blind spots, both literal and metaphorical,
is that the brain just fills in the gap. We
don't perceive them as blind spots. We don't perceive them
at all. There is, of course, a cure for the
curse of dunning Krueger, and that to ask for advice
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is lemon juice, an invisibility potion as well as an
invisible ink. MacArthur Wheeler could really have used a second
opinion on that point, but doing so alas would first
have required him to doubt his own reasoning on the matter.
And the problem with Dunning Kruger, remember, is that we
don't know what we don't know, or whether what we
(25:00):
don't know is important. But the other reason MacArthur Wheeler
might have been reluctant to ask for advice is that
he was planning to commit a crime. He couldn't get
a second pair of eyes on his plans because his
plans were illegal. I don't think it's a coincidence that
so many Dunning Krueger stories are about criminals, because while
(25:21):
we all find it hard to ask for constructive criticism,
it's particularly difficult to ask for constructive criticism of your
plan to rob a bank. But what really worries me
is the prospect that as a society, we're backing ourselves
(25:42):
into a place where we can't ask each other for advice.
Look at politics right now. It's so polarized, so hostile.
Whatever the Republicans do or say, the Democrats will say,
it's stupid and evil. Whatever the Democrats do or say,
the Republicans will say it's stupid and evil. Now, not
(26:02):
here to wring my hands and call for a return
to civility and politics and making a very specific point
about the Dunning Kruger effect. If whatever you do, whatever
you say, is treated with a howl of protest, there's
no way for information to flow. When somebody tells you
you're being stupid, you'll ignore them. You'll ignore them because
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they always say you're stupid. You'll ignore them because for
good reasons you don't trust them once we only trust
ourselves and people who think like us. We've abandoned our
best defense against the Dunning Kruger effect. Just ask Lao Labata.
It is not enough fuel to good to Australia. Dun't
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lay to us. Of course, it was all fake news
to them. They didn't know what they didn't know, and
when he told them, of course, they weren't going to listen.
I want you to Australia. It is noon on board
call Australian now unless you want it bad. I am
(27:09):
not Jockie very well. Please give me the telephone number
you want me to call Leo. His presence of mind
is unbelievable. The hijackers flip through the Ethiopia Airways timetable
until they find the phone number of the Ethiopia Airways
ticket agent. When they get it, Leol explains that he's
(27:29):
going to have to route the call via air traffic
control in Nairobi. He gives air traffic Control his position,
his heading, and his fuel reading, and then when air
traffic Control tells him he hasn't got a chance of
making it to Australia, he agrees. I just wanted our
hijackers to hear what you are communicating, and if you
(27:50):
have anything to say, go ahead and tell them. I
am advising you that with two hours fuel you will
be unable to reach your destination and he will probably
douch in the ocean. The best solution for you is
to lend the ambassa and pick some more fuel. The
hijackers told him to switch off the radio. Laol had
(28:11):
been flying south along the coast of Africa, trying to
make sure he didn't get out of reach of an airport.
He was ordered again to call Australia and again took
the opportunity to inform air traffic control of his situation.
It was the last straw turn, lift flay away from
the gust. We are going to Australia. Laol was now
(28:34):
headed towards the Commorous Islands, where he knew there was
a runway. The plane was almost out of fuel. The
chief hijacker was sitting next to him, drinking whiskey, messing
with the controls and kicking the rudder. Laoll pointed to
the empty fuel gage. The hijacker kept prodding away at
the controls, with the Commorous Islands in view. Laoll begged
(29:00):
again to be allowed to land. The right engine ran dry.
As the lead hijacker got up to talk to his friends,
Layol grabbed the intercom and warned the passengers, ladies and gentlemen,
this is your pilot. We have run out of fuel
and we are losing one engine. This time mean we
are expecting crash landing in. That is all I have
to say. We have lost already one engine, and I
(29:22):
ask all passengers to react to the hijackers. The hijacker
returned and knocked the microphone out of his hand. Layoll
descended to try to prevent a store with the hijacker
screaming at him to maintain altitude. The fuel is gone.
The engines have no power. If you touched those controls,
I will kill you. I'm already did, because I am
(29:44):
flying in an airplane with odi engine power. The plane
is gliding down within sight of the shore, but there's
so little power that only the most basic controls are working.
The hijacker is still trying to operate the flaps himself
from the co pilot's seat. He doesn't know, but he
doesn't know at that moment. First Officer yon Us Mercuria
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forces his way back into the cabin. What do any
of them have to lose? The cabin now contains Layol
and Yonas and three drunk hijackers fighting for control of
a dead airplane. While Yonas wrestles with the attackers, Layol
wrestles with a plane. Somehow he manages to get her
(30:29):
down in shallow water. The landing is witnessed by the
ghast holidaymakers. They're sunbathing on the beach, interrupted by the drama,
just five hundred yards offshore. The first touch is gentle,
the left wingtip slicing into the water at about two
hundred miles per hour. For a moment, it seems like
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the plane might just make it. Then the engine scoops
into the water, dramatically, slowing the plane. She hits a reef,
and then she cart wheels breaks apart. Fifty people survive,
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but the dunning Kruger hijack kills one hundred and twenty
five people, including the hijackers. People who don't know what
they don't know can be dangerous, and when they refuse
to listen to what they're being told, when they dismiss
it as lies and fakery, they can be Deadly. Key
(31:56):
sources for this episode include Nigel Blunt Deel's The World's
Most Daring Vagabonds and Villains and an interview with David
Dunning on the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For
a full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
(32:18):
It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound
design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
Cautionary Tales Helena Bonham Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi,
Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobenerholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett,
(32:44):
Messiam Unrowe, and Rufuss Wright. This show wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Neil LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane,
John Schnarz, Carli mcglory, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor,
and Yellow Lakhan and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a
(33:04):
production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please
remember to rate, share, and review.
Pushkin. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated hijacking. Three somewhat drunk
young men charged into the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airline's
(00:37):
plane and grabbed a fireman's axe from the wall. Everybody
should be seated, I herbim bump. They beat up the
first officer and pushed him out of the flight deck,
then made their demands. The pilot, forty two year old
Leel Abata, was an Ethiopian Airlines veteran. He had dealt
(00:57):
with two previous hijackings. Both times he had eventually managed
to talk the hijackers into giving themselves up. Both times,
nobody had been hurt. This new hijacking was alarming, but
perhaps manageable. So outnumbered three to one in the cockpit,
(01:18):
Laoll played it cool. He assumed the hijackers were not
interested in murder. This was five years before nine eleven.
Laoll reckoned the men who took over his plane wanted
money or attention, or maybe they were desperate to be
taken somewhere, and he was right. This was a simple
old school hijacking. The hijackers just wanted the plane to reroute.
(01:42):
It was November the twenty third, nineteen ninety six. The plane,
a Boeing seven sixty seven, was flying from the capital
of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, to the capital of Kenya, Nairobi,
and the hijackers wanted to go somewhere else, namely Australia.
There was just one problem. There wasn't the slightest chance
(02:06):
that they could fly the distance. Ethiope In Airlines Flight
nine six one was in the middle of a Dunning
Kruger hijack. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales.
(02:43):
This tale is about the Dunning Kruger effect, what it is,
how it became famous, and what we get wrong about it.
But we should probably start by explaining what the Dunning
Kruger effect is, and for that we have to start
with a gentleman named MacArthur Wheeler. You wouldn't have thought
you'd have much trouble picking mister Wheeler out of a lineup.
(03:05):
He was five ft six and two hundred and seventy pounds,
the height of a jockey and the weight of a linebacker.
But when detectives knocked on his door in the early
hours of the twentieth of April nineteen ninety five and
arrested him on suspicion of carrying out two bank robberies
in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He was astonished, but I
(03:28):
wore the lemon juice. OW wore the lemon juice, a
perplexed Wheeler declared to the equally perplexed detectives. MacArthur Wheeler
was destined to be convicted in court. He was also
destined to become a minor legend in the field of
behavioral science, as an inspiration for two academic psychologists, David
(03:51):
Dunning and Justin Krueger. When David Dunning read about MacArthur Wheeler,
he thought, here is an incompetence so fascinating, so profound,
as to be worthy of close study. It turns out
that mister Wheeler had been told that squeezing lemon juice
on his face would render him invisible to security cameras
(04:13):
and thus able to rob banks with impunity. Exactly where
this theory came from is unclear. Maybe it's because lemon
juice can be used to make invisible ink. Maybe it's
because well, I don't know. I just don't know. But
MacArthur Wheeler didn't just take some guy's word for it.
(04:34):
That would be just plain stupid, wouldn't it. No, he
decided to test the idea. He bathed his face in
lemon juice, and then he pointed a polaroid camera at
his stinging face, with his blinded eyes streaming tears through
closed lids, and took a test selfie. And you know what,
he wasn't in the shot. The juice worked. Now You
(04:58):
or I might think maybe he didn't give the photograph
time to develop, or maybe blinded by the juice, he
pointed the camera at a blank wall rather than at
his own face. But it did not seem to have
occurred to MacArthur Wheeler that anything might be amiss. One
thing is clear enough, Wheeler was no better at photography
(05:18):
than he was at robbing banks. But beyond this quite
riveting ineptitude. Why was the academic researcher David Dunning so
intrigued by the case of MacArthur Wheeler. It's because the
thing about MacArthur Wheeler was not just that he was
an incompetent bank robber, but that he had no idea
(05:39):
that he was an incompetent bank robber, and people who
did not know they were incompetent were just the kind
of people that David Dunning and Justin Krueger had begun
to study. Dunning and Krueger set tests of competence to
groups of undergraduates. Then they asked them how they stacked
up to others in the group. For example, were they
(06:01):
better able than other students to distinguish funny from unfunny jokes.
Let's hear two of the jokes. Have a think about
which one of him is funny? Joke one, question what
is as big as a man but weighs nothing? Answer
his shadow or joke Two. If a kid asks where
(06:22):
rain comes from, I think a cute think to tell
him is God is crying. And if he asks why
God is crying, another cute think to tell him is
probably because of something you did. Now, I don't need
to tell you that. The first joke is not really
a joke at all. It's more of a riddle. Riddles
aren't usually funny, and we have a special name for
(06:42):
riddles that are funny. We call them jokes. The second
joke is written by Jack Handy, one of the funniest
men in the world, and was highly rated by a
panel of professional comedians Now, since I agree that joke
two is funnier, I guess that means I'm pretty good
at recognizing what's funny. But when Dunning and Krueger asked
(07:03):
their experimental subjects exactly that question, how good is your
ability to recognize what's funny? They found something interesting. The
students had no idea, or, to be more precise, all
the students thought they were pretty good. Some were right,
and some weren't. Those who had no sense of humor
(07:26):
just didn't realize it. But humor was just one of
the things that Dunning and Kruger tested. They also gave
tests of logical reasoning and of grammar. For grammar, they
found the same story as for humor. For logic, Dunning
and Kruger found something even more striking here. The good
but not great students realized they were good but not great.
(07:49):
But there were two groups of students who thought they
were outstanding logicians, the ones who'd done very well and
the ones who'd done very badly, Ladies and gentlemen. This
is the Dunning Kruger effect. Cautionary tails will return in
(08:12):
a moment. On flight nine six one, things aren't going well.
The hijackers remember have beaten up the co pilot, whose
(08:32):
name is Jonas Mercuria. They're threatening Layola Bata, the pilot,
and they're demanding that he fly them thousands of miles
to Australia. The hijackers are a strange bunch. They claim
they're a group of eleven. Maybe there are only three
of them on the flight deck with Layol. They're young,
in their mid twenties, clean shaven, they're nervous. One of
(08:56):
them has a stocking cap pulled down over his face
to conceal his features, but the other two haven't bothered,
so go figure. The leader has grabbed the public address system.
He tells passengers, speaking in the Ethiopian language, AM harrick,
we skipped from prison. Yeah, against the government. We are
(09:17):
hijacking the Blint. We have an explosive. If anybody morse,
we'll exploded. Le can't actually see an explosive. One of
the hijackers has grabbed a little fire axe from where
it's been stowed in the cockpit. That makes some sense
as an improvised weapon, although it also suggests he didn't
manage to smuggle a weapon on board. He also has
(09:39):
a bottle of whiskey that he's looted from the duty
free cart. A second hijacker has a fire extinguisher, again
opportunistically grabbed from stowage and the cockpit. That makes a
lot less sense. The third man has a glove. He says,
there's a bomb in the glove. Okay. In his other
(10:00):
hand he's got well, another bottle of stolen whiskey. The
men are not easy to understand. They're drunk and what
demanding seems crazy. But there are three of them and
there's only one of leol. So he's trying to do
what they tell him to do. Dick us to Australia.
Take the plane to Australia. There is not enough fuel
(10:22):
to go to Australia. Don't lay to us. They're smacking
him around, punching him, threatening him with the axe and
with a now broken whiskey bottle. There is not enough
fuel to go to Australia. The plane is only fuel
to fly to Niadobe. If you want to go to Australia,
we have to refuel. We can land at Mombassa and refuel.
Stop laying. We know you're lying. Take us to Australia.
(10:45):
We are not landing in Mombassa. LAOL is already trying
to work out how to get a message to Mombassa Airport,
but the hijackers have other ideas. We need to refuel ah.
We know the plane can fly for eleven hours without refueling.
(11:05):
This plane does not have enough fuel for that. Stop laying.
We know you're lying. We read this in your own magazine.
It's true. The in flight magazine of Ethiopian Airlines was
called Salamta. It still is, and the magazine did indeed
have one of those about our aircraft sections. Ethiopian Airlines
(11:28):
whilst the very first airline in the world to place
an order for the extended range version of the Bowing
seven sixty seven, so I imagine they were pretty keen
to boast about it. But just because a fully fueled
extended range Bowing seven sixty seven er could, in theory
get you from Addis Ababa to Australia six thousand miles
(11:50):
or so away, well it didn't mean that this particular
plane fueled for a short hop to Nairobi could make it,
because it couldn't. This plane has only a light fuel load.
We must land in Mumbasa. Dodds lay we've done our
zech they really had. Later police would raid the hijackers
(12:11):
hideout in Addis, they'd find a copy of salam To magazine,
and true enough, the Boeing seven sixty seven's maximum flight
time was underlined. These drunk young men thought they were
so smart that they had no idea how dumb they
really were. For Dunning Kruger hijack, Dunning and Krueger wrote
(12:38):
up their findings in a nineteen ninety nine research paper
titled Unskilled and Unaware of It. It's fun to read.
They even begin with the story of MacArthur Wheeler. Their
study was noticed in the cloisters of academia, but didn't
make much impression beyond them, not at first anyway. I
tracked Google searches for Dunning Kruger effect since two thousand
(13:01):
and four, and by way of comparison, I picked another
concept from social science, the tipping point, made famous by
Malcolm Gladwell himself in his first book, which of course
you should read, Ah, tim, what a sweet thing to say,
Not at all. In two thousand and four, nobody was
searching for Dunning Krueger. Loads of people were searching for
(13:24):
the tipping point. Gradually Over time, the Dunning Kruger effect
started to attract some attention. It first seemed to enter
the popular consciousness around the summer of twenty ten, and
it grew and grew. For a few years. It was
neck and neck with the tipping point, which, remember is
one of the most popular of all popularizations of an
(13:47):
idea in social science. Then in the summer of twenty sixteen,
interest in Dunning Krueger really starts to searge. You know,
all of my life, I've heard that a truly successful person,
a really really successful person, cannot run for public offers.
The US presidential election campaign is building. People are talking
(14:11):
about Donald Trump as the Dunning Kruger candidate, the presidential
hopeful who's so dumb he doesn't know how dumb he is.
But maybe Trump doesn't much care about that, because, of
course he wins, I'm a very stable genius. And the
Dunning Kruger effect is more famous now than it's ever been.
It's become a straight up insult now, a highbrow way
(14:34):
to accuse someone of the stupidest stupidity of all, to
accuse someone of being such an idiot they don't even
know they're an idiot. Suddenly we're all living in a
dunning Kruger world. We're surrounded by more ROMs who don't
know their more ROMs, and like Pilot Naoula Bata, we're outnumbered.
(14:57):
MacArthur Wheeler was by no means the only incompetent bank robber.
One Florida gentleman handed a bank cashier in Delray Beach
a misspelled note which read a berm, I can blow
you sky high. The note was passed around the bank staff,
most of whom were reduced to hysterics foiled, the humiliated
(15:20):
thief ran away. You don't have to go very far
to find collections of these bungling incompetence online, but my
favorite source is an old book by the British writer
Nigel Blundell, called the World's Most Daring Ragabonds and Villains.
Some of Blundell's protagonists are smart and ruthless. Some of
(15:40):
them are so creative and daring as to deserve the
title of criminal mastermind, but some of them not so much.
There was the Texas bank robber. This is a sticker.
The cashier, just twenty years old, replied, you're in the
wrong line. Please wait over there. He tamely obeyed and
(16:02):
was still in the line when the police arrived. Burglars
offer equally compelling examples of incompetence. One French gentleman robbed
the home of a Parisian antique dealer, having first opted
to don a suit of fifteenth century armor. The plan was,
(16:23):
I think, to appear more intimidating. While some men might
have quailed at the sight and indeed the clattering sound
of a suit of armor climbing the stairs in the
middle of the night, the quick witted homeowner shoved the
intruder down the stairs and then pinned him by pushing
a heavy antique sideboard over on him. When the police arrived,
(16:46):
they found that the armor had been sufficiently dented as
to make it impossible to easily remove, so the miscreant
had to be fed through his visor until an armorer
could be found. Another burglar tried to squeeze through a
skylight into a store in the middle of the night.
Finding that his clothes were bunching up and getting in
(17:07):
the way, he removed them, dropped them through the skylight,
then tried to squirm through after them, as he still
couldn't quite fit, leaving his clothes inside the store, and
the burglar buck naked on the roof. By the way,
I should tell you that while I have sources for
(17:29):
the other stories, the one about the naked burglar and
the skylight is one I merely recall reading decades ago,
and all I really remember is that I laughed until
I cried. So I googled around trying to find more details,
and instead I found a much more recent example of
a naked burglar trapped in a ventilation shaft in Milwaukee,
(17:52):
again because he felt he would make more progress through
a narrow space without his garments. I am forced to
conclude that not only did this actually happen, it happened twice.
The idiocy isn't always in the crime itself, as one
criminal suspect proved. He was accused of snatching a purse
(18:14):
at a shopping center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in October nineteen
seventy six. Unwisely, he decided to act as his own
defense lawyer. Cross examining the victim, he asked, did you
get a good look at my face when I took
your purse? The entire court burst out laughing, including the
robbery victim. If I'd been the one that was there.
(18:40):
He was promptly found guilty. The spectacular ineptitude of mister
Lemon Juice MacArthur Wheeler may have inspired Dunning and Krueger,
but he is not alone. Cautionary tales will return in
a minute. I love a good story about stupid people
(19:10):
doing stupid things, but I worry that perhaps we're missing
something very important about the Dunning Kruger effect. In eighteen
ninety six, an Austrian doctor named Gabriel Anton stood up
at a medical conference to discuss some curious cases in
what we would now call neuroscience. Anton is remembered partly
(19:32):
in the medical eponym Anton Babinski syndrome. People who suffer
from Anton Babinsky syndrome are blind, but that's not what's
strange about this condition. Now. What's strange about people with
Anton Babinski syndrome is that they don't realize that they
can't see. Doctor Anton had other examples. There was a
(19:55):
gentleman who was quite deaf and also quite unaware that
he was deaf. He knew that he struggled in conversation,
but his explanations didn't make much sense. For example, he
blamed background noise for the fact that he couldn't hear
what people were saying to him. He'd ask people questions
and didn't seem too worried by the fact that he
(20:15):
never perceived their answers. Such cases are typically the result
of damage to the brain itself, resulting in a lack
of self insight that strains imagination. They're very rare and
very strange. But I worry that we've come to think
of the Dunning Kruger effect as a bit like the
(20:36):
Anton Babinski syndrome, that it's a special kind of disability
that afflicts a distinct class of clueless idiot, like the
hapless bank robber, that since you and I, dear listener,
are not clueless, we are therefore thankfully immune. But Dunning
Kruger isn't like that at all. Rather, their research paper,
(20:58):
Unskilled and Unaware of It describes a common truth about
the way we think. We all lack self insight some
of the time, and in particular, when we've strayed beyond
our sphere of competence, we may lack the competence to
know it. The Dunning Kruger effect isn't just about stupid
(21:19):
people doing stupid things. It's about clever people doing stupid
things too, and those clever people may include you and me.
One example that struck me was the sudden popularity of
me too on social media, more than a decade after
being introduced by the activist Tarana Burke. Me too is
(21:40):
often described as a movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment,
which of course it is, but think about what me
too is really doing. It all went big in late
twenty seventeen when the actor Alissa Milano encouraged women to
post me too if they had suffered sexual harassment or assault.
(22:01):
She wrote, we might give people a sense of the
magnitude of the problem. She could have written it's time
that abusers face consequences, or it's time to stop blaming
women for their own harassment, but she focused like a
laser on a dunning Kruger issue. Men who thought of
themselves as decent, considerate, nice guys who had no idea
(22:25):
what many women were having to deal with. I'd put
myself squarely in that category. I don't think I'm stupid.
I don't think lemon juice makes me invisible to cameras.
But on this point, until Me Too, I didn't begin
to get it, and that I think was Milano's point.
Men need to understand how often this is happening to
(22:48):
the women around them. They don't know what they don't know.
David Dunning found that he had given birth to an
academic idea that became a cultural touch point. But Professor
Dunning has spent the last few years running around telling
people their misunderstanding the effect. The first rule of the
Dunning Kruger Club, he told the website Vox, is you
(23:11):
don't know you remember, and while we're all members, we
drop in and out of the clubhouse without knowing it.
As David Dunning wants put it, there's a borderline between
what we know and what we don't know. And it's
so easy to cross over that borderline. One moment we
know what we're doing. The next moment we've strolled into
the Dunning Kruger Clubhouse, and we still think we know
(23:33):
what we're doing, but we don't. Any of us can
step over that threshold at any moment, and like Wiley
coyote walking over a cliff and standing suspended in mid air,
it might take a while before we realize that we've
wandered away from solid ground. Sometimes we know we're unskilled
(23:55):
or ignorant. I can't play the flute, and I know
I can't. But very often the failure of skill or
knowledge goes hand in hand with a failure of self insight.
We don't know what we don't know. Dunning Kruger isn't
about stupidity. It's about blind spots. Everyone has blind spots.
(24:16):
And the thing about blind spots, both literal and metaphorical,
is that the brain just fills in the gap. We
don't perceive them as blind spots. We don't perceive them
at all. There is, of course, a cure for the
curse of dunning Krueger, and that to ask for advice
(24:40):
is lemon juice, an invisibility potion as well as an
invisible ink. MacArthur Wheeler could really have used a second
opinion on that point, but doing so alas would first
have required him to doubt his own reasoning on the matter.
And the problem with Dunning Kruger, remember, is that we
don't know what we don't know, or whether what we
(25:00):
don't know is important. But the other reason MacArthur Wheeler
might have been reluctant to ask for advice is that
he was planning to commit a crime. He couldn't get
a second pair of eyes on his plans because his
plans were illegal. I don't think it's a coincidence that
so many Dunning Krueger stories are about criminals, because while
(25:21):
we all find it hard to ask for constructive criticism,
it's particularly difficult to ask for constructive criticism of your
plan to rob a bank. But what really worries me
is the prospect that as a society, we're backing ourselves
(25:42):
into a place where we can't ask each other for advice.
Look at politics right now. It's so polarized, so hostile.
Whatever the Republicans do or say, the Democrats will say,
it's stupid and evil. Whatever the Democrats do or say,
the Republicans will say it's stupid and evil. Now, not
(26:02):
here to wring my hands and call for a return
to civility and politics and making a very specific point
about the Dunning Kruger effect. If whatever you do, whatever
you say, is treated with a howl of protest, there's
no way for information to flow. When somebody tells you
you're being stupid, you'll ignore them. You'll ignore them because
(26:25):
they always say you're stupid. You'll ignore them because for
good reasons you don't trust them once we only trust
ourselves and people who think like us. We've abandoned our
best defense against the Dunning Kruger effect. Just ask Lao Labata.
It is not enough fuel to good to Australia. Dun't
(26:48):
lay to us. Of course, it was all fake news
to them. They didn't know what they didn't know, and
when he told them, of course, they weren't going to listen.
I want you to Australia. It is noon on board
call Australian now unless you want it bad. I am
(27:09):
not Jockie very well. Please give me the telephone number
you want me to call Leo. His presence of mind
is unbelievable. The hijackers flip through the Ethiopia Airways timetable
until they find the phone number of the Ethiopia Airways
ticket agent. When they get it, Leol explains that he's
(27:29):
going to have to route the call via air traffic
control in Nairobi. He gives air traffic Control his position,
his heading, and his fuel reading, and then when air
traffic Control tells him he hasn't got a chance of
making it to Australia, he agrees. I just wanted our
hijackers to hear what you are communicating, and if you
(27:50):
have anything to say, go ahead and tell them. I
am advising you that with two hours fuel you will
be unable to reach your destination and he will probably
douch in the ocean. The best solution for you is
to lend the ambassa and pick some more fuel. The
hijackers told him to switch off the radio. Laol had
(28:11):
been flying south along the coast of Africa, trying to
make sure he didn't get out of reach of an airport.
He was ordered again to call Australia and again took
the opportunity to inform air traffic control of his situation.
It was the last straw turn, lift flay away from
the gust. We are going to Australia. Laol was now
(28:34):
headed towards the Commorous Islands, where he knew there was
a runway. The plane was almost out of fuel. The
chief hijacker was sitting next to him, drinking whiskey, messing
with the controls and kicking the rudder. Laoll pointed to
the empty fuel gage. The hijacker kept prodding away at
the controls, with the Commorous Islands in view. Laoll begged
(29:00):
again to be allowed to land. The right engine ran dry.
As the lead hijacker got up to talk to his friends,
Layol grabbed the intercom and warned the passengers, ladies and gentlemen,
this is your pilot. We have run out of fuel
and we are losing one engine. This time mean we
are expecting crash landing in. That is all I have
to say. We have lost already one engine, and I
(29:22):
ask all passengers to react to the hijackers. The hijacker
returned and knocked the microphone out of his hand. Layoll
descended to try to prevent a store with the hijacker
screaming at him to maintain altitude. The fuel is gone.
The engines have no power. If you touched those controls,
I will kill you. I'm already did, because I am
(29:44):
flying in an airplane with odi engine power. The plane
is gliding down within sight of the shore, but there's
so little power that only the most basic controls are working.
The hijacker is still trying to operate the flaps himself
from the co pilot's seat. He doesn't know, but he
doesn't know at that moment. First Officer yon Us Mercuria
(30:08):
forces his way back into the cabin. What do any
of them have to lose? The cabin now contains Layol
and Yonas and three drunk hijackers fighting for control of
a dead airplane. While Yonas wrestles with the attackers, Layol
wrestles with a plane. Somehow he manages to get her
(30:29):
down in shallow water. The landing is witnessed by the
ghast holidaymakers. They're sunbathing on the beach, interrupted by the drama,
just five hundred yards offshore. The first touch is gentle,
the left wingtip slicing into the water at about two
hundred miles per hour. For a moment, it seems like
(30:52):
the plane might just make it. Then the engine scoops
into the water, dramatically, slowing the plane. She hits a reef,
and then she cart wheels breaks apart. Fifty people survive,
(31:27):
but the dunning Kruger hijack kills one hundred and twenty
five people, including the hijackers. People who don't know what
they don't know can be dangerous, and when they refuse
to listen to what they're being told, when they dismiss
it as lies and fakery, they can be Deadly. Key
(31:56):
sources for this episode include Nigel Blunt Deel's The World's
Most Daring Vagabonds and Villains and an interview with David
Dunning on the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For
a full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com.
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
(32:18):
It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound
design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
Cautionary Tales Helena Bonham Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi,
Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobenerholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett,
(32:44):
Messiam Unrowe, and Rufuss Wright. This show wouldn't have been
possible without the work of Neil LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane,
John Schnarz, Carli mcglory, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor,
and Yellow Lakhan and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a
(33:04):
production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please
remember to rate, share, and review.
Host
Tim Harford
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