The Dunning- Kruger Bolsonaro

When I first read about the Dunning- Kruger effect I stood days thinking about it. In a very condensed explanation, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias when people with low abilities overestimate themselves while those highly qualified can, sometimes, under estimate their abilities.

This study can be fundamental to understand the time we are living. Now, behavioural researches are more important than ever. When social measures are applied, individual choices save lives.

Analysing the success of China to stop the spread of Covid-19 just in the beginning of the crisis, among other things, self-isolation has been one of the key factors to avoid China to following the fate of United States or Italy. Of course, we can discuss the democracy in China and the circumstances that allowed the government to act effectively. But the key point that I want to highlight is the social measures. How important it is to understand that we are just one more person in a complex society - how worthless we are without the others.

Why is so hard to some people to understand that they are common? Why cannot we see ourselves as mediocre human beings? Not a worthless human being, just average. Why being average is so bad?

We grew up in a culture of super-heroes, the chosen ones; our idea of success is to become the richest, the smartest, the most handsome, and the one who brings the title to the nation and saves the day in the last few minutes. Unfortunately, or fortunately, life is not like that, in the real-world society needs a lot of people to achieve results. After one year or two Hollywood is going to make a movie about someone who did a great thing to save the world from corona virus, even if everyone knows that thousands of doctors and nurses had died saving people, we are going to talk and remember about this unique hero.

It is not a problem to recognise a personal effort. It becomes a problem when this individual hero mindset starts to affect normal people in their normal lives, avoiding us/them to understand that we/they are mortals, and in this case, just numbers. We don’t want to be statistics, but we are and there is no problems to follow rules and act as scientist ask us to do.

A few weeks ago, the president of Brazil in an official speech said that he had been an athlete, so he couldn’t be worried about being affected by corona virus. It seems to be the main thought of most of the Brazilian males. The sense that they are stars from an action movie, unbeatable by flu, because the ones who die are the others, not them. Contrastingly, most of the scientists and doctors are afraid from the virus. An example is the head of the healthcare system in Brazil. The better the scientist, the more afraid he/she is to made right and wrong statements – science rarely is about right or wrong as Hollywood is.

Perhaps, if scientists had overestimated themselves in the West as average people do, the situation could be better by them taking stronger positions in the beginning. But the first step to work with science is to be humble and respect our flaws and the possible flaws of our researches – every day, it is becoming harder to beat common sense and fake news, the average people seem to be so right about their beliefs that even good researchers start to questioning science.

The hero mindset, the individual idea that we are different from others, is the most dangerous thing to the world today. There is no iron man with iron lungs, no country with a nice weather that can beat the virus. We are all in the same war as unknown soldiers and learning to be humble and recognising that it is a collective effort is the best we can do.