The robberies
Below is a true story about a man called McArthur Wheeler.
On 19 April 1995, Wheeler walked into two banks in Pittsburgh, Mellon Bank and PNC Bank. He robbed both of them in broad daylight and made no meaningful attempt to conceal his identity. He even looked directly at the CCTV cameras.
He was arrested later the same day.
When police confronted him with the CCTV footage, he responded, in genuine confusion, “But I wore the juice!”
When pressed on this, Wheeler explained that he had applied lemon juice to his face. He believed this would work in the same way as invisible ink and would make him invisible to cameras. He claimed to have tested this beforehand by taking a photograph of himself with lemon juice on this face. When his face did not appear in the photo, he took that as proof that the method worked.
The key point here is that he was not guessing. He had “validated” his idea, but the experiment itself was fundamentally flawed.
Wheeler was charged with multiple counts of robbery, convicted, and sent to prison.
Dunning-Kruger
Two American psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, came across the case through media reports. They set out to understand what had happened.
More specifically, they wanted to answer a simple question. How can someone be so confident and so wrong at the same time?
What followed was a series of controlled experiments. Participants were tested on their abilities in areas such as logic, grammar, and humour. They were then asked to assess their own performance.
The results were consistent.
Those with the lowest ability significantly overestimated their competence. At the same time, they lacked the ability to recognise their own mistakes.
This became known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Why this matters
If you put a group of people in a room and had them sit an IQ test, the people who scored the lowest would be the ones who believed they had done the best.
That is the problem.
People in that category are not just wrong. They are incapable of recognising that they are wrong. That makes them extremely dangerous.
In the context of professionals working in the built environment, that lack of self-awareness and inability to self-regulate one’s own behaviour can have serious consequences.
It becomes even more concerning when the institutions that are meant to regulate professionals and protect the public appear to be asleep at the wheel.