Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher, mathematician and essayist, once wrote: "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Along the same lines, over 100 years ago, Charles Darwin, author of "On the Origin of Species," voiced the opinion that "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."

It always pleases me when I find my own sentiments echoed by someone else. When two of the greatest minds in history corroborate what I have believed most of my life, it's a genuine thrill.

Is it true, though, that people who actually know very little believe that they are as bright as or brighter than most? Has there been a scientific study? Yes.

Beginning in 1999, David A. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, performed a series of tests and came up with results, now sometimes known as "The Dunning-Kruger effect," that proved incompetent people think more highly of their abilities than they should.

They administered a series of tests on various subjects, analyzed the results and then asked each person how they thought their scores compared to others who took the test with them. Consistently, people who scored lower were sure they had scored "better than average," even those who scored in the lowest percentile of all people taking the tests.

The first result was expected, but they also discovered that those who actually had scored higher than most of the people taking the tests ranked themselves as "average."

This study, published with the title "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments," was awarded the 2000 Nobel Prize for Psychology.

After the initial grading and scoring, the test subjects were handed tests taken by their fellow participants and asked to grade them. Those originally scoring the highest, after grading the tests and seeing how badly others had performed, upgraded their opinion of how well they had done themselves.

Those who had scored the lowest did not change their opinions of how well they had done, even with the evidence in front of them that others had done much better.

It wasn't a surprise to me that those who scored the lowest thought they had performed much better than they actually had. I was a little startled, though, that they were unable to even recognize that they were wrong. More simply, they didn't know enough to see they were not knowledgeable.

The conclusions of that test explained a lot. It cleared up the reason for a large percentage of the anonymous comments that follow the stories and columns appearing in online publications as to how people suddenly become experts 30 seconds after reading about something of which they previously knew nothing.

Of course, running across this study had a down side. It has left me wondering exactly how wrong I may be about how competent I really am in the things I believe I do well. What if people are just pretending to like my chicken and dumplings to spare my feelings?