Shakespeare, Students, Politicians, a Nun, and the Dunning-Kruger Effect
"Man, proud man, dressed in a little brief authority / Most ignorant of what he is most assured"
Claudio and Isabella (1850) by William Holman Hunt (Wikimedia Commons)
Of all thirty-eight plays by Shakespeare (or forty, depending on how you count them), Measure for Measure is my favorite. It’s a tale of hypocrisy, moral overreach, and the abuse of power. Even though the plot unwinds in a medieval prison, it rings perhaps too true in 21st-century America.
Vincentio, the Duke of Vienna, is a curious man—especially curious about his subjects and how they might comport themselves if he were not around to maintain order. To find out, he stages an experiment by pretending to have been called out of town, leaving his trusted assistant Angelo in charge. Disguised as a friar, the duke remains in Vienna to watch what happens. Says Vincentio, “Hence shall we see, / If power change purpose.”1
Angelo has a reputation for his seemingly strict moral character and as a stickler for rules and regulations. True to his form, he closes the brothels almost immediately upon the duke’s supposed departure. And, to make an example for the people of Vienna, he arrests citizen Claudio for fornication. Technically, Claudio is guilty: Juliet, the woman to whom he is engaged, has become visibly pregnant. Obviously, they had not delayed their intimacy while their marriage was held up by negotiations over the dowry. But Angelo invokes an old and nearly-forgotten law providing the death penalty for sex outside of marriage, even though such an extreme punishment has not been used for years.
As the unfortunate Claudio languishes in prison awaiting the executioner, his sister Isabella (who happens to be a novice nun), comes to the prison to plead with Angelo for her brother’s life. But Angelo stands resolute; Claudio must lose his head the next day.
Unexpectedly, however, Angelo finds himself attracted to Isabella and tells her he needs a day to think over the case. The next morning, he proposes a shocking bargain: If she will agree to sleep with him, he will spare Claudio, exchanging her virginity for her brother’s life.
Incensed, Isabella turns to him saying:2
Man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he’s most assured,
His glassy essence,3 like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep . . .
Psychologists would say that Isabella is describing a cognitive bias common among ill-informed people who are “most ignorant of what [they are] most assured.” They call this the Dunning-Kruger effect,4 named after two theorists who first described it. You may also recognize it as rampant among certain prominent elected (and unelected) officials.5
In brief, the Dunning-Kruger effect says that people who are unskilled or misinformed lack the ability to judge their own competence. Indeed they frequently overestimate their knowledge or abilities. It’s why most drivers believe their driving skills are above average. It also accounts for Americans’ tendency to overestimate their knowledge of politics, especially those who consider themselves supporters of one of the major political parties.
And in studies of self-assessed competence, Dunning and his collaborators asked respondents how familiar they were with terms from such fields as biology, politics, geography, and physics. The trick was that Dunning’s team had simply made up some of the terms. The results? Some 90% of the subjects claimed at least some familiarity with the fabricated terms.6
What I find most remarkable, however, is that Will Shakespeare understood this idea—a concept that would not be rediscovered by psychological science for another four hundred years!
None of us is immune to the Dunning-Kruger effect, of course, because the things of which we are likely to be “most assured” are the pillars of our worldviews—notions that we received unchallenged when young and unfettered by reason. It takes courage and a critical mindset to challenge these “received ideas” and risk having one’s whole understanding of the world collapse. Moreover, these are likely to be strongly held, hot-button ideas about morality, sexuality, religion, and politics.
So, what happens to poor Claudio? I’ll not give you a spoiler, but I will offer this hint: Measure for Measure is technically a comedy—although that may be hard to imagine from the brief summary above. But Renaissance comedies are not necessarily funny. Rather, in the meaning of “comedies” in Shakespeare’s day, they were plays involving love, clever wordplay, and in which the survivors usually got married.
Measure for Measure, 1.3.57
Measure for Measure, 2.2.146
Glassy essence = reflection in a mirror
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121–1134. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121
Dunning, D. (2016, May 25). The psychological quirk that explains why you love Donald Trump. Politico Magazine. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-supporters-dunning-kruger-effect-213904/
Cherry, K. (2025). How the Dunning-Kruger effect works: This cognitive bias makes it hard to recognize our own lack of skill. VeryWell Mind. https://www.verywellmind.com/an-overview-of-the-dunning-kruger-effect-4160740