"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. Dunning and Kruger attributed the bias to the metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately.
Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:
fail to recognize their own lack of skill
fail to recognize genuine skill in others
Dunning has since drawn an analogy ("the anosognosia of everyday life") with a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability because of brain injury seems unaware of, or denies the existence of, the disability, even for dramatic impairments such as blindness or paralysis: "If you're incompetent, you can’t know 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.
Supporting Studies
Dunning and Kruger set out to test these hypotheses on Cornell undergraduates in psychology courses. In a series of studies, they examined subject self-assessment of logical reasoning skills, grammatical skills, and humor. After being shown their test scores, the subjects were asked to estimate their own rank. The competent group estimated their rank accurately, while the incompetent group overestimated theirs. As Dunning and Kruger noted:
Across four studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd."
My thoughts are that an individual can reach such a heightened sense of superiority that they no longer attempt to understand someone who correctly identifies shortcomings in that individual, whether they be shortcomings in World of Warcraft or mental health.
Regarding some of the language used in this thread, some words say more about the person that uses them than they do about anyone else. Faggot is an example word, and is probably used as an insecurity coping mechanism. Try to consider the impact that a word like this could have on someone reading it, the emotional distress that could be attached to it.
