The Dunning Kruger Hijack (and Other Criminally Stupid Acts)
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It wasn't a particularly sophisticated hijacking. Three somewhat drunk young men charged into the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airlines plane and grabbed a fireman's axe from the wall. Everybody should be seated. I have a bomb. They beat up the first officer and pushed him out of the flight deck, then made their demands.

The pilot, 42-year-old Lael Abata, was an Ethiopian Airlines veteran. He'd dealt with two previous hijackings. Both times, he'd eventually managed to talk the hijackers into giving themselves up. Both times, nobody had been hurt. This new hijacking was alarming, but perhaps manageable.

So, outnumbered three to one in the cockpit, Lael played it cool. He assumed the hijackers were not interested in murder. This was five years before 9/11. Lael reckoned the men who took over his plane wanted money or attention, or maybe they were desperate to be taken somewhere. And he was right. This was a simple old-school hijacking. The hijackers just wanted the plane to reroute.

It was November 23rd, 1996. The plane, a Boeing 767, was flying from the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, to the capital of Kenya, Nairobi. And the hijackers wanted to go somewhere else, namely Australia. There was just one problem. There wasn't the slightest chance that they could fly the distance.

Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 was in the middle of a Dunning-Kruger hijack. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to Cautionary Tales. This tale is about the Dunning-Kruger effect. What it is, how it became famous and what we get wrong about it.

But we should probably start by explaining what the Dunning-Kruger effect is. And for that, we have to start with a gentleman named MacArthur Wheeler. You wouldn't have thought you'd have much trouble picking Mr Wheeler out of a line-up. He was 5ft 6 and 270lbs, the height of a jockey and the weight of a linebacker.

But when detectives knocked on his door in the early hours of 20 April 1995 and arrested him on suspicion of carrying out two bank robberies in his hometown of Pittsburgh, he was astonished. But I wore the lemon juice! I wore the lemon juice! A perplexed Wheeler declared to the equally perplexed detectives...

MacArthur Wheeler was destined to be convicted in court. He was also destined to become a minor legend in the field of behavioural science, as an inspiration for two academic psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger. When David Dunning read about MacArthur Wheeler, he thought, here is an incompetence so fascinating, so profound, as to be worthy of close study.

It turns out that Mr Wheeler had been told that squeezing lemon juice on his face would render him invisible to security cameras and thus able to rob banks with impunity. Exactly where this theory came from is unclear. Maybe it's because lemon juice can be used to make invisible ink. Maybe it's because... well, I don't know. I just don't know.

But MacArthur Wheeler didn't just take some guy's word for it. That would be just plain stupid, wouldn't it? No, he decided to test the idea. He bathed his face in lemon juice. And then he pointed a Polaroid camera at his stinging face with his blinded eyes streaming tears through closed lids and took a test selfie. And you know what? He wasn't in the shot. The juice worked.

Now, you or I might think, maybe he didn't give the photograph time to develop. Or maybe, blinded by the juice, he pointed the camera at a blank wall rather than at his own face. But it did not seem to have occurred to MacArthur Wheeler that anything might be amiss. One thing is clear enough, Wheeler was no better at photography than he was at robbing banks.

But beyond this quite riveting ineptitude, why was the academic researcher David Dunning so intrigued by the case of MacArthur Wheeler? It's because the thing about MacArthur Wheeler was not just that he was an incompetent bank robber, but that he had no idea that he was an incompetent bank robber. And people who did not know they were incompetent were just the kind of people that David Dunning and Justin Kruger had begun to study.

Dunning and Kruger set tests of competence to groups of undergraduates. Then they asked them how they stacked up to others in the group. For example, were they better able than other students to distinguish funny from unfunny jokes? Let's hear two of the jokes, have a think about which one of them is funny. Joke 1. Question. What is as big as a man but weighs nothing? Answer. His shadow. Or joke 2.

Now, I don't need to tell you that the first joke is not really a joke at all. It's more of a riddle. Riddles aren't usually funny and we have a special name for riddles that are funny. We call them jokes.

The second joke is written by Jack Handy, one of the funniest men in the world, and was highly rated by a panel of professional comedians. Now, since I agree that joke two is funnier, I guess that means I'm pretty good at recognising what's funny. But when Dunning and Kruger asked their experimental subjects exactly that question, "How good is your ability to recognise what's funny?" they found something interesting. The students had no idea.

Or to be more precise, all the students thought they were pretty good. Some were right and some weren't. Those who had no sense of humour just didn't realise it. But humour was just one of the things that Dunning and Kruger tested. They also gave tests of logical reasoning and of grammar. For grammar, they found the same story as for humour. For logic, Dunning and Kruger found something even more striking.

Here, the good but not great students realised they were good but not great. But there were two groups of students who thought they were outstanding logicians, the ones who'd done very well and the ones who'd done very badly. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the Dunning-Kruger effect. Cautionary Tales will return in a moment.

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On flight 961, things aren't going well. The hijackers, remember, have beaten up the co-pilot, whose name is Jonas Mercuria. They're threatening Lael Abata, the pilot, and they're demanding that he fly them thousands of miles to Australia. The hijackers are a strange bunch. They claim they're a group of 11. Maybe there are only three of them on the flight deck with Lael, but they're young, in their mid-20s, clean-shaven.

They're nervous. One of them has a stocking cap pulled down over his face to conceal his features, but the other two haven't bothered, so go figure. The leader has grabbed the public address system. He tells the passengers, speaking in the Ethiopian language Amharic. We escaped from prison. We are against the government. We are hijacking the plane. We have an explosive. If anybody moves, we'll explode it.

Eliel can't actually see an explosive. One of the hijackers has grabbed a little fire axe from where it's been stowed in the cockpit. That makes some sense as an improvised weapon, although it also suggests he didn't manage to smuggle a weapon on board. He also has a bottle of whiskey that he's looted from the duty-free cart. A second hijacker has a fire extinguisher, again opportunistically grabbed from stowage in the cockpit. That makes a lot less sense.

The third man has a glove. He says there's a bomb in the glove. Okay. In his other hand, he's got, well, another bottle of stolen whiskey. The men are not easy to understand. They're drunk, and what they're demanding seems crazy.

But there are three of them, and there's only one of Layul, so he's trying to do what they tell him to do. Take us to Australia. Take the plane to Australia. There is not enough fuel to go to Australia. Don't lie to us. They're smacking him around, punching him, threatening him with the axe and with a now-broken whiskey bottle. There is not enough fuel to go to Australia. The plane is only fueled to fly to Nairobi. If you want to go to Australia, we have to refuel. We can land at Mombasa and refuel. Stop lying!

We know you're lying. Take us to Australia. We are not landing in Mombasa. Lael is already trying to work out how to get a message to Mombasa airport, but the hijackers have other ideas. We need to refuel. We know the plane can fly for 11 hours without refueling. This plane does not have enough fuel for that. Stop lying. We know you're lying. We read this in your own magazine.

It's true. The in-flight magazine of Ethiopian Airlines was called Salamta. It still is. And the magazine did indeed have one of those about our aircraft sections in it.

Ethiopian Airlines was the very first airline in the world to place an order for the extended range version of the Boeing 767, so I imagine they were pretty keen to boast about it. But just because a fully fuelled extended range Boeing 767ER could, in theory, get you from Addis Ababa to Australia, 6,000 miles or so away,

Well, it didn't mean that this particular plane, fuelled for a short hop to Nairobi, could make it, because it couldn't. This plane has only a light fuel load. We must land in Mombasa. Don't lie. We've done our research. They really had. Later, police would raid the hijacker's hideout in Addis. They'd find a copy of Salamta magazine. And, true enough, the Boeing 767's maximum flight time was underlined.

These drunk young men thought they were so smart, but they had no idea how dumb they really were for Dunning-Kruger hijack. Dunning and Kruger wrote up their findings in a 1999 research paper titled Unskilled and Unaware of It. It's fun to read. They even begin with the story of MacArthur Wheeler. Their study was noticed in the cloisters of academia, but didn't make much impression beyond them. Not at first, anyway.

I tracked Google searches for Dunning-Kruger effect since 2004, and by way of comparison, I picked another concept from social science: the tipping point, made famous by Malcolm Gladwell himself in his first book, which, of course, you should read. Ah, Tim, what a sweet thing to say. Not at all. In 2004, nobody was searching for Dunning-Kruger. Loads of people were searching for the tipping point.

Gradually, over time, the Dunning-Kruger effect started to attract some attention. It first seemed to enter the popular consciousness around the summer of 2010. And it grew. And grew. For a few years it was neck and neck with the tipping point, which, remember, is one of the most popular of all popularisations of an idea in social science.

Then, in the summer of 2016, interest in Dunning-Kruger really starts to surge. You know, all of my life I've heard that a truly successful person, a really, really successful person, cannot run for public office.

The US presidential election campaign is building. People are talking about Donald Trump as the Dunning-Kruger candidate. The presidential hopeful who's so dumb he doesn't know how dumb he is. But maybe Trump doesn't much care about that because, of course, he wins. I'm a very stable genius. And the Dunning-Kruger effect is more famous now than it's ever been.

It's become a straight-up insult now. A highbrow way to accuse someone of the stupidest stupidity of all. To accuse someone of being such an idiot they don't even know they're an idiot. Suddenly, we're all living in a Dunning-Kruger world. We're surrounded by morons who don't know they're morons. And like pilot Naul Abata, we're outnumbered. MacArthur Wheeler was by no means the only incompetent bank robber.

One Florida gentleman handed a bank cashier in Delray Beach a misspelled note which read: "I got a bum. I can blow you sky-high." The note was passed around the bank staff, most of whom were reduced to hysterics. Foiled, the humiliated thief ran away.

You don't have to go very far to find collections of these bungling incompetents online. But my favourite source is an old book by the British writer, Nigel Blundell, called The World's Most Daring Vagabonds and Villains. Some of Blundell's protagonists are smart and ruthless. Some of them are so creative and daring as to deserve the title of criminal mastermind. But some of them, not so much. There was the Texas bank robber,

This is a sticker. The cashier, just 20 years old, replied... You're in the wrong line. Please wait over there. He tamely obeyed and was still in the line when the police arrived. Burglars offer equally compelling examples of incompetence. One French gentleman robbed the home of a Parisian antique dealer, having first opted to don a suit of 15th century armour.

The plan was, I think, to appear more intimidating. While some men might have quailed at the sight, and indeed the clattering sound of a suit of armour climbing the stairs in the middle of the night, the quick-witted homeowner shoved the intruder down the stairs and then pinned him by pushing a heavy antique sideboard over on him.

When the police arrived, they found that the armour had been sufficiently dented as to make it impossible to easily remove, so the miscreant had to be fed through his visor until an armourer could be found. Another burglar tried to squeeze through a skylight into a store in the middle of the night. Finding that his clothes were bunching up and getting in the way, he removed them, dropped them through the skylight, then tried to squirm through after them. Alas...

He still couldn't quite fit, leaving his clothes inside the store and the burglar, buck naked, on the roof. By the way, I should tell you that while I have sources for the other stories, the one about the naked burglar and the skylight is one I merely recall reading decades ago. And all I really remember is that I laughed until I cried. So I googled around, trying to find more details.

And instead, I found a much more recent example of a naked burglar trapped in a ventilation shaft in Milwaukee. Again, because he felt he would make more progress through a narrow space without his garments, I'm forced to conclude that not only did this actually happen, it happened twice.

The idiocy isn't always in the crime itself, as one criminal suspect proved. He was accused of snatching a purse at a shopping centre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in October 1976. Unwisely, he decided to act as his own defence lawyer. Cross-examining the victim, he asked, Did you get a good look at my face when I took your purse? The entire court burst out laughing, including the robbery victim. If I'd been the one that was there...

he was promptly found guilty. The spectacular ineptitude of Mr Lemon Juice MacArthur Wheeler may have inspired Dunning and Kruger, but he is not alone. Cautionary Tales will return in a minute.

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I love a good story about stupid people doing stupid things. But I worry that perhaps we're missing something very important about the Dunning-Kruger effect. In 1896, an Austrian doctor named Gabriel Anton stood up at a medical conference to discuss some curious cases in what we would now call neuroscience.

Anton is remembered partly in the medical eponym Anton-Babinski syndrome. People who suffer from Anton-Babinski syndrome are blind, but that's not what's strange about this condition. No, what's strange about people with Anton-Babinski syndrome is that they don't realise that they can't see.

Dr Anton had other examples. There was a gentleman who was quite deaf and also quite unaware that he was deaf. He knew that he struggled in conversation but his explanations didn't make much sense. For example, he blamed background noise for the fact that he couldn't hear what people were saying to him. He'd ask people questions and didn't seem too worried by the fact that he never perceived their answers.

Such cases are typically the result of damage to the brain itself, resulting in a lack of self-insight that strains imagination. They're very rare and very strange.

But I worry that we've come to think of the Dunning-Kruger effect as a bit like the Anton Babinski syndrome. That it's a special kind of disability that afflicts a distinct class of clueless idiot, like the hapless bank robber. That since you and I, dear listener, are not clueless, we are therefore thankfully immune. But Dunning-Kruger isn't like that at all.

Rather, their research paper, unskilled and unaware of it, describes a common truth about the way we think.

We all lack self-insight some of the time. And in particular, when we've strayed beyond our sphere of competence, we may lack the competence to know it. The Dunning-Kruger effect isn't just about stupid people doing stupid things. It's about clever people doing stupid things too. And those clever people may include you and me.

One example that struck me was the sudden popularity of Me Too on social media, more than a decade after being introduced by the activist Tarana Burke. Me Too is often described as a movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment, which of course it is.

But think about what Me Too is really doing. It all went big in late 2017, when the actor Alyssa Milano encouraged women to post Me Too if they had suffered sexual harassment or assault. She wrote, We might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem. She could have written, It's time that abusers face consequences, or It's time to stop blaming women for their own harassment.

But she focused like a laser on a Dunning-Kruger issue. Men who thought of themselves as decent, considerate, nice guys, who had no idea what many women were having to deal with. I'd put myself squarely in that category. I don't think I'm stupid. I don't think lemon juice makes me invisible to cameras. But on this point, until Me Too, I didn't begin to get it.

And that, I think, was Milano's point. Men need to understand how often this is happening to the women around them. They don't know what they don't know. David Dunning found that he'd given birth to an academic idea that became a cultural touchpoint. But Professor Dunning has spent the last few years running around telling people they're misunderstanding the effect.

The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger Club, he told the website Vox, is you don't know, you remember. And while we're all members, we drop in and out of the clubhouse without knowing it.

As David Dunning once put it, there's a borderline between what we know and what we don't know. And it's so easy to cross over that borderline. One moment we know what we're doing, the next moment we've strolled into the Dunning-Kruger clubhouse. And we still think we know what we're doing, but we don't. Any of us can step over that threshold at any moment.

And like Wile E. Coyote walking over a cliff and standing suspended in mid-air, it might take a while before we realise that we've wandered away from solid ground. Sometimes we know we're unskilled or ignorant. I can't play the flute, and I know I can't. But very often the failure of skill or knowledge goes hand in hand with a failure of self-insight. We don't know what we don't know.

Dunning-Kruger isn't about stupidity. It's about blind spots. Everyone has blind spots. And the thing about blind spots, both literal and metaphorical, is that the brain just fills in the gap. We don't perceive them as blind spots. We don't perceive them at all.

There is, of course, a cure for the curse of Dunning-Kruger, and that's to ask for advice. Is lemon juice an invisibility potion as well as an invisible ink? MacArthur Wheeler could really have used a second opinion on that point, but doing so, alas, would first have required him to doubt his own reasoning on the matter. And the problem with Dunning-Kruger, remember, is that we don't know what we don't know, or whether what we don't know is important.

But the other reason MacArthur Wheeler might have been reluctant to ask for advice is that he was planning to commit a crime. He couldn't get a second pair of eyes on his plans because his plans were illegal. I don't think it's a coincidence that so many Dunning-Kruger stories are about criminals because while we all find it hard to ask for constructive criticism, it's particularly difficult to ask for constructive criticism of your plan to rob a bank.

But what really worries me is the prospect that, as a society, we're backing ourselves into a place where we can't ask each other for advice. Look at politics right now. It's so polarised, so hostile. Whatever the Republicans do or say, the Democrats will say it's stupid and evil.

Whatever the Democrats do or say, the Republicans will say it's stupid and evil. Now, I'm not here to wring my hands and call for a return to civility in politics. I'm making a very specific point about the Dunning-Kruger effect. If whatever you do, whatever you say, is treated with a howl of protest, there's no way for information to flow. When somebody tells you you're being stupid, you'll ignore them.

You'll ignore them because they always say you're stupid. You'll ignore them because, for good reasons, you don't trust them. Once we only trust ourselves and people who think like us, we've abandoned our best defence against the Dunning-Kruger effect. Just ask Lael Labata. There is not enough fuel to go to Australia. Don't lie to us. Of course, it was all fake news to them. They didn't know what they didn't know.

And when he told them, of course, they weren't going to listen. I want you to telephone Australia. There is no telephone on board. Call Australia now, unless you want a beating. I am not joking. Very well, please give me the telephone number you want me to call. Lael, his presence of mind is unbelievable. The hijackers flip through the Ethiopia Airways timetable until they find the phone number of the Ethiopia Airways ticket agent.

When they get it, Leoul explains that he's going to have to route the call via air traffic control in Nairobi. He gives air traffic control his position, his heading, and his fuel reading. And then, when air traffic control tells him he hasn't got a chance of making it to Australia, he agrees. I just wanted our hijackers to hear what you are communicating, and if you have anything to say, go ahead and tell them.

The hijackers told him to switch off the radio. Leul had been flying south along the coast of Africa, trying to make sure he didn't get out of reach of an airport.

He was ordered again to call Australia, and again took the opportunity to inform air traffic control of his situation. It was the last straw. Turn left, fly away from the coast. We are going to Australia. Lael was now headed towards the Comoros Islands, where he knew there was a runway. The plane was almost out of fuel.

The chief hijacker was sitting next to him, drinking whisky, messing with the controls and kicking the rudder. Lael pointed to the empty fuel gauge. The hijacker kept prodding away at the controls. With the Comoros Islands in view, Lael begged again to be allowed to land. The right engine ran dry. As the lead hijacker got up to talk to his friends, Lael grabbed the intercom and warned the passengers.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot. We have run out of fuel and we are losing one engine this time and we are expecting crash landing and that is all I have to say. We have lost already one engine and I ask all passengers to react to the hijackers. The hijacker returned and knocked the microphone out of his hand. Lael descended to try to prevent a stall, with the hijacker screaming at him to maintain altitude. The fuel is gone. The engines have no power. If you touch those controls, I will kill you.

I am already dead because I am flying an airplane without engine power. The plane is gliding down within sight of the shore, but there's so little power that only the most basic controls are working. The hijacker is still trying to operate the flaps himself from the co-pilot's seat. He doesn't know what he doesn't know. At that moment, First Officer Jonas Mercuria forces his way back into the cabin. What do any of them have to lose?

The cabin now contains Leul and Jonas and three drunk hijackers fighting for control of a dead airplane. While Jonas wrestles with the attackers, Leul wrestles with the plane. Somehow, he manages to get her down in shallow water. The landing is witnessed by aghast holidaymakers. They're sunbathing on the beach, interrupted by the drama just 500 yards offshore. The first touch is gentle.

The left wingtip slicing into the water at about 200 miles per hour. For a moment, it seems like the plane might just make it. Then the engine scoops into the water, dramatically slowing the plane. She hits a reef and then she cartwheels and breaks apart. 50 people survive, but the Dunning-Kruger hijack kills 125 people, including the hijackers.

People who don't know what they don't know can be dangerous. And when they refuse to listen to what they're being told, when they dismiss it as lies and fakery, they can be deadly.

Key sources for this episode include Nigel Blundell's The World's Most Daring Vagabonds and Villains and an interview with David Dunning on the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For a full list of references, see timharford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of Cautionary Tales are Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Wright, alongside Nizar Eldorazi, Ed Gohan, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Coben Holbrook-Smith,

Greg Lockett, Masaya Munro and Rufus Wright. This show wouldn't have been possible without the work of Mia LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane, John Schnarz, Carly Migliori, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor, Aniela Lacan and Maya Koenig.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to rate, share and review.

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