[quote=walterwhite]i think we are encouraged to suffer from this. i read an article in a recent trade journal about “confidence” in my line of work. a successful person said when she was young, she was asked by senior partner if she knew how to do a particular task ona tight timeline. she said ‘sure!” she gave this as an example of the correct way to be at work to move ahead. i understand a can-do attitude, and “fake it till you make it”, the problem is, dude, you may be the guy who leaks a billion barrels int he gulf or whatever. on the other hand, president is so complex a task no one is really competent, i suppose.[/quote]
Scaredy, I think the practice you cite is endemic in the workplace, especially today plenty of evidence in documentaries like “Smartest Guys In The Room” or some of the recent Frontline docs on the financial meltdown.
But anosognosia is different. These people honestly have absolutely no clue that they’re not dealing with a full deck, so to speak. Socially, they are competent, and function in a completely normal way. They escape notice from almost everyone because there’s not the duplication of skills in the workplace that there used to be. I think, in many situations, jobs have become so specialized that their co-workers (and, in some cases, their supervisors) may have no clue as to what their job really entails. If they are really confident in their abilities, it becomes even difficult to determine that they are incompetent.
Here’s part of Dr. Babinski’s description: “One such patient . . . hit by left hemiplegia has largely maintained her intellectual and affective faculties, for many months. She remembered past events well, was willing to talk, expressed herself correctly, her ideas were sensible; she was interested in persons known to her and asked about new people . . . No hallucinations, delirium, confusional state, confabulation. What did contrast with the apparent preservation of intelligence of this patient was that she seemed to ignore the existence of a nearly complete hemiplegia, which she had been afraid of for many years. Never did she complain about it; never did she even allude to it. If she was asked to move her right arm, she immediately executed the command. If she was asked to move the left one, she stayed still, silent, and behaved as if the question had been put to somebody else.”
