What Is It Like When You Don't Know That You Don't Know?

What if a thief believes he won't get caught because he thinks he is invisible?  This really happened.

First, some insight into how we tick.  The anchoring effect. Human brains have built in thought-saving functions to enable action.

In 2006 at MIT Dan Ariely, Drazen Prelec, and George Loewenstein asked students to bid on a bottle of wine. As a sales pitch, they described the great quality of the bottle. The anchoring effect occurred when each student had to write down the last two digits of his or her social security number as if it were the price of the item. The anchoring effect influenced their judgement. Say the last two social security digits were 11, then the student bid $11 or a relatively lower offer. If 33. the bid was $33 or in that range. If, say, 55, the the bid was higher yet. The outcome was that students with higher numbers paid up to 346 percent more than those with lower numbers. The experiment demonstrates that people are tricked by inherent functions of their own brains, in this case something they saw before biased them to a judgement not based on rational processing.

In the evolution of species we didn't have time to mull things over. It was act or die. Thus the anchoring effect.

I am not saying the anchoring effect bears on the thief's situation.  I am saying none of us uses reason as much as we believe we do. What follows is different. It shows self-delusion of a different kind. The thief's kind.

Anosognosia is a term to describe a deficit of self-awareness. It describes a clinical condition in which a person with some disability seems unaware of its existence.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a term for a cognitive bias. (David Dunning, Justin Kruger.) The bias can occur in people of low ability. It imparts an illusory superiority in which they mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. As Errol Morris put it, "Our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence."

This report of a crime suggests both.

"At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast " (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, article by Michael A. Fuoco, 1995, o/a January 13).

Read on for what happened as well as the thief's response.


"At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington. Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, Pennsylvania was wanted in connection with bank robberies on Jan. 6, 1995 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12." (Michael A. Fuoco)

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight. What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.

 The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest. There he was with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money. Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.

“But I wore the juice,” he said. Apparently, he was under the impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

In a follow-up article, journalist Michael Fuoco spoke to several Pittsburgh police detectives who had been involved in Wheeler’s arrest. Commander Ronald Freeman assured Fuoco that Wheeler had not gone into “this thing” blindly but had performed a variety of tests prior to the robbery. Sergeant Wally Long provided additional details — “although Wheeler reported the lemon juice was burning his face and his eyes, and he was having trouble (seeing) and had to squint, he had tested the theory, and it seemed to work.” He had snapped a Polaroid picture of himself and wasn’t anywhere to be found in the image. It was like a version of Where’s Waldo with no Waldo. Long tried to come up with an explanation of why there was no image on the Polaroid photos when Wheeler looked at them. He came up with three possibilities:

(a) the film was bad;

(b) Wheeler hadn’t adjusted the camera correctly; or

(c) Wheeler had pointed the camera away from his face at the critical moment when he snapped the photo.

As psychologist David Dunning read through the article he thought that 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.

In a New York Times interview with David Dunning, Errol Morris asked why if you're incompetent you don't know you're incompetent?

Dunning replied that "If you knew it, you’d say, “Wait a minute.  The decision I just made does not make much sense.  I had better go and get some independent advice.”   But when you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.  In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.  And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas.  And to our astonishment, it was very, very true."

 People may get a chuckle out of this but they should remember one thing.  The thief provides an exceptional instance of self-ignorance but anchoring bias as well as a host of other cognitive ignorances--confirmation bias, availability heuristic, backfire effect, etc.--reveal that we all fool ourselves in some way.  Our evolved brains are those of higher-functioning primates, not the super-intelligent.

Several psychological surveys revealed that most people regard themselves as above-average drivers and considered others as below average. a statistical impossibility. People fancy themselves similar to Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.