Brighton Heights case were dropped. Dunning–Kruger effect A brief account of the robberies was included in the 1996 World Almanac. David Dunning, a professor of social psychology at Cornell University, discovered this story and subsequently a longer article about the case in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He came to believe that "If Wheeler was too stupid to be a bank robber, perhaps he was also too stupid to know that he was too stupid to be a bank robber — that is, his stupidity protected him from an awareness of his own stupidity." With his graduate student Justin Kruger, he organized a research program to determine whether someone's perceived competence could be measured against their actual competence. They authored the 1999 paper "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments", in which they found that "when people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine." This became known as the Dunning–Kruger effect. Other uses R. Lofton Hudson, a pastor and psychologist, argued that Wheeler exhibited a "lack of relational awareness" that normally was found in all humans. According to him, "we mistakenly and uncritically believe in our relational skill set when in reality those skills may be no more effective than Mr. Wheeler's special cream." In motivational literature, There Is an I in Team: What Elite Athletes and Coaches Really Know About High Performance features Wheeler as an example of the importance of critical and accurate self-examination. Wheeler's failure to understand his performance deficit was used as an argument for performance pay for teachers by an education policy think-tank. The case also became a thought experiment for criminologists to consider as an example of their own incompetence. Notes References 1995 in Pennsylvania Bank robberies January 1995 crimes January 1995 events in the United States Robberies in the United States