On a cold January afternoon in 1995, McArthur Wheeler and Clifton Johnson walked into the cash counter of the Mellon Bank at Swissvale, Pittsburgh, pointed a semi-automatic gun at the cashier, and walked away with $5,200 in cash. Before leaving, Wheeler looked straight at the CCTV camera and smiled. He was sure that his face will not be recognised by the camera because he had dabbed a special formula on his face — lemon juice. Both the robbers’ smiling pictures were beamed over TV screens within hours of the crime. They were promptly tracked down and arrested.
“But I wore lemon juice on my face,” was the surprised response of the robber as he was being handcuffed.
Just the belief
It seems his friend had told him that dabbing lemon juice on the face makes one unrecognisable on a CCTV camera. He tried smearing some on his face and photographed himself on a Polaroid camera and got a blank print, confirming his belief. Obviously, his camera film was defective.
While the whole world laughed at their comical act, and labelled them as dumb, Professor David Dunning and his student Justin Kruger at Cornell University thought otherwise. The reason they overestimated their ability to rob a bank was their low skill level.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is defined as overestimation of skill by a person with a low skill-set, and it holds good for every profession.
I had just graduated from medical school, finished internship and made it through the postgraduate entrance. With a white coat, a black stethoscope, and an inflated ego, I joined the Government Medical College, Thiruvanantha- puram. I was not boastful, but felt confident and certainly proud of my achievement.
The patient in the ward suddenly became breathless. Oxygen and IV line were started, and I jumped into action. But the man was sinking, becoming more and more breathless. We put him in a trolley and rushed him to the ICCU. I was sure that he was suffering from a heart failure and needed to be connected to a ventilator.
In the melee, one stern female voice said, “Doctor, could you hold on for a moment?” The elderly nurse in-charge of the ICCU, watching all the drama, came forward with a long forceps. One swift move, she opened the patient’s mouth and pulled out a wired denture form the patient’s mouth. Immediately, the patient became quiet and started breathing normally. It was a simple case of aspirated artificial denture that choked his windpipe. Treated by a set of pseudo-confident, low-skilled doctors, who overestimated their skill, he was saved at the nick of time by an experienced nurse.
Today, years later, I still remember the incident but in a different perspective. Another young man, a computer professional, had seen me with high blood pressure, diabetes, and high cholesterol; he had a bad family history, with multiple close relatives suffering heart attacks. I had talked to him and explained how important it was to take care of those risk factors as I wrote his prescription. Next time I saw him was three years later, at the emergency room with severe chest pain. The ECG showed a massive heart attack, which he mistook as “gas”.
He had not taken the medicines that I had prescribed. He had a skyscraper-high blood sugar level, a cloud-hugging cholesterol level and stratospheric blood pressure number.
“Why did you not take medicines,” I asked.
“Doctor, I always google-search and read everything before taking decisions. I read and found out that blood pressure and cholesterol medicines can create kidney and liver problem and memory loss. So, I avoided them. I take green tea, food supplements and antioxidants. They are very safe, you see.”
I did see the connection.
Dunning and Kruger were wrong. It is not just that people with poor skill level who overestimate their skill. People sporting white coat with a black stethoscope speaking Greek and Latin, as well as those conversing in Java, tweaking a Python and sleep off hugging a laptop, are also vying to enter the elite club.
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