“We Are All Confident Idiots” was published in the Pacific Standard online magazine by David Dunning. David Dunning is a professor and psychologist and is writing this article to psychology students and to those who need to be introduced to the concept of “incompetence” of humans with topics that are fake. The article was published on October 27, 2014 but continues to be read by many readers even years later. 

The psychologist discovered through analyzing Jimmy Kimmel’s experiment and making his own research with respondents, that incompetence actually gives people more confidence when they do not know the answer. Turns out that we humans find it difficult to differentiate what we know, and we do not, that is why we assume so much more than we actually do because we often forget everything we have learned. There is an underlying reason why we are so quick to answer questions we do not know the answer of, and that is fear of sounding stupid. We judge so many people of their idiocy that we do not want it flipped on us. Admitting an honest “I don’t know” may actually be intelligent because we are actually telling the truth. David Dunning uses experiments, surveys, and then provides the readers different stories of research such as interviews and quantitative. The sources he included was very effective and was able to make his argument stronger. It provided proof that self-confidence is very high to those incompetent but also to the misinformed. In this course, we will have to write plenty of times on topics we did not know about and this article provides the reassurance that it is very likely we will write about things we have little information about but try to make it sound like we do. It would be more effective however, to write only of what we already know and elaborate on those facts.