Quote:
Originally Posted by MaxCandy
Yes, that must be it.
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Oh, there's more, and it's funny:
McArthur Wheeler
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler robbed a Fidelity Savings Bank and a Mellon Bank in Pittsburgh, PA, on the same day. According to police, he was accompanied by an accomplice, Clifton Earl Johnston. In order to disguise himself, Wheeler covered his face in lemon juice. Lemon juice has been used as a type of "invisible ink"; when used as ink on paper and allowed to dry, lemon juice only appears when heated. Wheeler used this fact as a basis to reason that placing unheated lemon juice on his face would render him invisible to bank security cameras.
Police reviewed the video of the robberies and were able to arrest Wheeler the same day. The video tape was played on the 11 o'clock news; within minutes an informant had provided police with McArthur Wheeler's name and by 12:15 AM he was in police custody. When shown the surveillance tape from the robberies, Wheeler was shocked and objected: "But I wore the juice". Wheeler had tested his lemon juice hypothesis prior to proceeding with the robberies.
After covering his face with lemon juice, he took a picture of himself using a Polaroid camera. At the time of Wheeler's arrest, he explained to one of the detectives handling his case, Sergeant Wally Long, that his face had failed to appear in the resulting photograph; a seeming confirmation of his theory. Detectives would speculate this result was caused by bad film, incorrect camera operation, or lemon juice in Mr. Wheeler's eyes.
Dunning?Kruger effect
Social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning were inspired to use his case as the basis for further research on the self-assessment of competence. Of interest to the researchers was Wheeler's complete faith in his ability to foil security cameras, despite his complete lack of competence in the task. Their study in turn demonstrated that the less competent an individual is at a specific task, the more likely they are to inflate their self-appraised competence in relationship to that task. This phenomenon is popularly referred to as the Dunning?Kruger effect.