General News
10 May, 2026
In good faith
IN GOOD FAITH: Have you ever had to deal with someone who thinks that they just know ‘everything’? Not only can they be extremely irritating, but also potently costly when they discover that things didn’t go the way they expected, or worse, dangerous, when they lead themselves or others into potentially hazardous situations.
For example, living in the arid, outback, as I do, leaves plenty of possibilities to become stranded or to find oneself in a potentially life-threatening situation, the most obvious one being getting lost in the desert.
This did once happen to someone I know, who found himself stranded after making a very elementary mistake, with no one knowing where he was. He survived, but it was a mistake he never made again!
Pride and overconfidence can be a huge problem, both for the over-confident person as well as for any others who may depending on them.
It is a common phenomenon that was studied in-depth in 1999 by two psychologists, named David Dunning and Justin Kruger.
They found that there definitely existed a ‘cognitive bias’ whereby people with low knowledge and ability in specific areas often tend to severely over-estimate their their abilities in these areas. We now know this tendency as the ‘Dunning-Kruger Effect’.
Since their 1999 research project, this effect has been demonstrated and proven many times over in further studies by other, fellow researchers, and can range across just about any area that you care to name, from science to politics, from business to literature, from religion to social issues and everything in-between.
The actual study by Dunning and Kruger focused on logical reasoning, grammar and social skills, and operated by comparing self-assessments with actual performance to determine the gaps between the two.
There have been different explanations suggested to explain this phenomenon, with the most popular, and likely, being that the individuals concerned simply don’t know enough about the subject to ‘know what they don’t know’, or indeed, to even recognise the possibility of a deficiency.
They effectively over-simplify the subject down to the level of their own perception and ability, while at the same time, in their pride they believe that their knowledge is complete. This forms a dangerous combination.
Anyone who uses social media in any form, or indeed even watches the news or reads the ‘paper’ or magazines will immediately recognise that today’s world is packed-full of ‘armchair experts’ who present as though they know everything about everything.
The sad truth is that today, according to the UK Reuters Institute, there now exists a very low perception of overall confidence in media and journalism, largely driven by a “perception of political bias and sensationalism,” and a “disconnection between journalists and their audiences.”
A major source of problems here are the efforts of ‘social media influancers’ who seem to have much to say about things they know little about, as though it is only their opinions that matter, with much damage being done as a result.
We live today in an age where we need to be very careful and selective about who we listen to and what reports we believe, especially on social media, lest we be misled.
Jesus teaches about the problem of pride and over-confidence, which seems to have existed even in His time, in Luke 18. He speaks about two men who went to the temple to pray.
The passage goes:
“Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people, robbers, evildoers, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.’
“But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner.’
“I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted.”
The pharisee in this account suffered from an extreme case of pride and over-confidence in himself and in his perception of his own qualities and attributes, which combined to present a hugely distorted idea of his own worth.
But Jesus was not fooled. This pharisee was destined for a fall, as is so often the case for the proud and over-confident, while the humble tax collector, who pleaded to God for mercy, would be saved.
The Bible teaches that it is by humility and grace that we come to our Lord. The book of Amos (5:4) says, “For thus says the Lord to the house of Israel: “Seek me and live.”
By David Young