"Which Will Come First in the Presidential/Veep Debates, the Chicken or the Egg? Answer: The Lemon Juice"

With the formal debates between the Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates about to begin, what better time to revisit Justin Kruger and David Dunning’s 1999 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, “Unskilled and Unaware of It”?

These Cornell University psychologists asked a group of undergraduates to take a battery of tests, including one to assess their skills of logical reasoning. What the researchers confirmed are probably among the most important findings in the history of the study of the mind.

What they found was that:

• The more incompetent people are, the more confidence they have in their own competence.
• The more incompetent people are, the less competence they have in recognizing competence in others.
• Even very competent people tend to overestimate the competence of others.

Neurologist Robert Burton makes the Kruger-Dunning article the centerpiece of an article in Salon.com warning that the upcoming debates are going to tell us next to nothing about what we really need and deserve to know about the candidates for the nation’s highest offices.

Even though it will likely never happen in a Presidential debate, here is what Burton would like to see happen:

• How the candidates respond when they are stumped. In his words, are they evasive, flustered or straightforward in admitting what they don't know or understand?
• How they each would respond when shown evidence that they are wrong. Burton wonders, “Is he or she capable of admitting to having made an error? Would he or she be flexible enough to change an opinion?”
• How adroit is each candidate’s intellectual grasp of scientific method when it comes to answering “difficult, complex questions about aspects of science such as global warming, stem-cell research or alternative energy sources for which they may not have adequate knowledge”?
• How does each candidate explain “faith-based” beliefs that he or she continues to hold that are in conflict with traditional reasoning and scientific method?

Burton says that knowing about such qualities of mind are critical in deciding which leaders are most capable of making the best decisions in bad times.

Americans’ experience with their current President is much on Burton’s mind as he reflects on the issue of how leaders adjudge their own levels of competence and the competence of others.

He writes, “Many of the failures of post-9/11 American policy were caused by or aggravated by the inability of our president to recognize his intellectual limitations (including his choice of advisors), keep an open mind, evaluate evidence such as the presence or absence of weapons of mass destruction, and listen to all sides of a complex issue. Perhaps this could have been avoided if Bush had been forced to publicly answer serious multifaceted questions prior to the election.”

Kruger and Dunning wrote about a person who held up two Pittsburgh banks in 1995 in broad daylight with no effort to disguise himself. He was quickly arrested after the surveillance tapes were shown on the 11 o’clock news. When the robber saw the tapes, he was incredulous. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. He had been under the impression that if he smeared lemon juice on his face, he would be invisible to the cameras.

We have had a President for the past eight years who appears to be a strong believer in a version of “the lemon juice effect.”

Because the upcoming debates will be conducted the way these debates are usually conducted—in controlled conditions that have been rehearsed to a fare-thee-well—we can have little confidence that we won’t get another President with the same susceptibilities.

Because whatever happens in these debates, we won’t be able to take a very good measure of the candidates’ thinking abilities when they must confront complex situations for which they don’t know the answers.

But then would it really matter if we all did get a genuine look at the candidates’ competency level at handling the kinds of issues that Presidents of the United States must handle. Dr. Burton isn’t sanguine. That’s because we nearly all will bring such strong feelings about the candidates to the debates. Again and again, Dr. Burton points out, feelings trump reason. (That is, "felt knowledge" triumphs "reasoned knowledge."). Because of the way our minds work, we all tend to rub lemon juice on our candidate’s face.

It is not a situation calculated to build confidence in our ability to select as President the person best equipped to keep lemon juice—and egg—off the nation’s face.


For Justin Kruger and David Dunning’s article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, go here: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
For Robert Burton’s article in Salon.com, go here: My candidate, myself