excerpts: chapter 3
Chapter 3: Often Wrong, but Never in Doubt?
Blind Spot #2: What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You!
One contestant on the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? quiz show was asked, as his first question, “What did little Jack Horner pull out of a pie?” Since Jack Horner is a character in one of the more well-known Mother Goose rhymes, there were probably thousands of children watching the show that night who knew the answer. But looking over the four choices, the contestant astonished viewers by picking “blackbird” rather than “plum.”
This incident is a great example of how quickly we label someone “stupid” when that person doesn‘t know something that we believe “everyone” should know. “How could he be so stupid!” viewers exclaimed. “How could he not have known that?”
But was this contestant’s ignorance a sign that he was stupid?
It’s clear that no one is born knowing what Jack Horner pulled out of a pie. It’s also clear that it’s not possible to logically reason out the answer to this question. The contestant had to know specific information, and he himself had remarked that he was afraid of getting a nursery rhyme question because he hadn’t been exposed to these rhymes as a child.
That comment triggered a second criticism of this contestant. “He just said that he didn’t know the Mother Goose rhymes. So why didn’t he use one of the lifelines to help him out here?” viewers asked. The answer to that question is simple: the contestant failed to get help because he didn’t know that he didn’t know the answer.
How can people know what they don’t know?