Just about everyone thinks that their boss is an idiot. Unless you’re self-employed or work for a very small “Main Street” type business (and sometimes even then), there’s somebody higher on the totem pole who’s so dumb that you sometimes wonder how they ever mastered the wily and mysterious shoelace. To make matters worse, if you work for a large company the idiot you answer to answers to an even bigger idiot, who answers to an even bigger idiot, and so on and so on. This promotion of the stupid makes absolutely no sense, but is nonetheless so common that it seems universal. There’s a scientific reason for that.

One of Bertrand Russell’s many famous quotes states that “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision." In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger conducted four studies that backed up Russell’s assertion. Subjects were tested on logic, grammar, and humor (don’t ask me how one can be objectively tested on humor) and asked to estimate their performance. Across the board, those who scored lowest on the tests grossly overestimated their performance, while those who scored highest tended to underestimate their ability. This cognitive bias has become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which states that unskilled people do not have the metacognitive ability to recognize their own shortcomings. Or, in, other words, stupid people are too stupid to realize they’re stupid, which makes them more confident in their abilities than those with actual ability who are smart enough to recognize their limitations.

So how do all these over-confident morons end up in positions of power? To answer that, just visit any web site that offers tips on interviewing for a job. While these lists and articles don’t always include “be confident” as a bullet point, the whole purpose of a job interview is to communicate your suitability and qualifications for the position, and that’s where the confident idiots win out. Smart people, even those who are confident in their abilities, know that they have limitations, and that generally a new job or promotion will have a learning curve. As a result, they’re going to be more realistic about their abilities, making them less likely to tell outrageous lies about their competency. Morons, on the other hand, can confidently assert that they can do anything the new position requires, because they’re just too dumb to realize that when they say that, they’re lying. So the confident idiots get the job. While my Google-fu wasn’t powerful enough to locate a study linking confidence to promotions (I did get a lot of sites offering to tell me how to be more confident, but based on Dunning-Kruger I already know the solution to that: a pipe wrench to the head), I’m willing to bet one exists.

You’d think that eventually the stupid would catch up to people and they’d be fired, but remember that the over-confident moron you work for is in all likelihood reporting to someone who’s even more over-confident, which probably means that the boss’s boss is an even bigger idiot. While there may be smart people in the top levels of the company, those people live in a world of spreadsheets and pie charts and reports that are far removed from the actual day-to-day operations of the business. These reports and graphs, of course, are prepared by the (minions of) over-confident idiots in middle management, each of whom hides, rationalizes, or deflects any hint of failure to avoid cognitive dissonance between their perception of their own ability and the reality of their own incompetence. Or, to put it more simply, shit rolls downhill.

While the Dunning-Kruger effect is most obvious in the corporate world, it’s also become increasingly prevalent in other sectors of American society. In politics, most of George W. “The Decider” Bush’s presidency was nothing more than the Dunning-Kruger effect cranked up to “10” and there’s a terrifying possibility that one day Sarah Palin, Rand Paul, or some other over-confident moron will find a way to make it go to “11” like a power-crazed Nigel Tufnel. In entertainment, the Dunning-Kruger effect is hard at work every time Michael Bay convinces somebody to let him direct another shitty movie and every time somebody says “we should get Carlos Mencia for this.” Unfortunately, knowing about the Dunning-Kruger effect won’t make dealing with your idiot boss (or another fucking Michael Bay movie) any easier. Sometimes science just doesn’t know shit.