Adan Juarez Ramirez had it all figured out—he could be a cop without having to take the boring test. But he was arrested in Grapevine, Texas, after pulling over a driver in his pickup truck, outfitted with flashing lights.
He even had an ID badge, which he’d made by blacking out a restaurant gift card and etching in the word “POLICE.”
However, he’d kept the restaurant’s logo, a jalapeño pepper surrounded by the words “Chipotle Mexican Grill.”
In 2007, a man from New Hampshire walked into a bank. He had branches and leaves taped to his head to disguise himself. He got away with some cash but was quickly recognized when the CCTV footage was released to the public.
In Iowa in 2009, two men drew fake beards and glasses on their faces with permanent markers. They did this before trying to break into apartments. They believed that drawing on their faces would make them unrecognizable to witnesses.
Their swift arrest proved their theory wrong.
Then, in 2020, two men tried to rob a convenience store in Virginia wearing hollowed-out melons on their heads to conceal their identity. Unsurprisingly, the duo were soon caught.
In 1995, McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks with lemon juice on his face. He believed it would make him invisible to security cameras like invisible ink.
He even smiled at the cameras and was caught within hours.
His case inspired the research that led to the discovery of the Dunning Kruger effect.
In the spring of 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two banks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to carry out robberies.
What made the case unusual wasn’t the crime itself but his belief in a bizarre “getaway tactic.”
Wheeler had smeared lemon juice on his face, convinced it would render him invisible to security cameras.
Lemon juice can be used as invisible ink. It only becomes visible when exposed to heat. This fact was the basis for his reasoning. He mistakenly assumed the same principle applied to surveillance footage.
When police reviewed the tapes, Wheeler was easily identifiable. He even looked directly at the cameras and smiled. He was confident in his “invisibility.”
Within hours, police arrested him. Shocked at being caught, Wheeler reportedly exclaimed: “But I wore the juice!”
The case caught the attention of psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. They were fascinated not just by Wheeler’s flawed logic but by his absolute confidence in it.
This became the foundation for their groundbreaking research into cognitive bias.
In 1999, they published their study on what is now called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It is a psychological phenomenon where people with limited knowledge or skill greatly overestimate their competence.
Wheeler’s lemon-juice blunder has since become a textbook example of this effect. It demonstrates how ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowledge, it can foster misplaced certainty.
His case, though humorous in hindsight, underscores a universal human flaw: the less we know, the more likely we are to overestimate our abilities.
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The Dunning-Kruger effect is an anomaly we may be seeing more of if children are not taught to think for themselves. Legal and illegal drugs probably wipe out enough grey matter to allow minds to believe they’ve metamorphosed into the Hulk.
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Sad and frightening.
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Yikes.
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I had a cousin, now long gone, who was sent to the Dope Farm at the age of 14. His crime was being a juvenile delinquent. After a year or so, he got out and joined a motorcycle gang called The Bandidos, a group of wannabe Hells Angels based in Texas. His claim to fame was attempting to rob a Piggly Wiggly grocery store dressed as a woman, using a starter pistol loaded with blanks. He got twenty years, but my father had some political pull in those days and got his sentence reduced to three years. The ungrateful hoodlum never said thank you or offered to repay the money my father spent on an attorney. He was my father’s sister’s son, so family came into play. He went on to bigger and better crimes and eventually was shot a few times by another motorcycle gang member. You can’t fix stupid, and that was his drug of choice…stupidity.
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Wow! Very interesting. I actually worked undercover in such a gang many years ago. I stopped after learning I was going to be a father. Glad I did. Looking back, now it doesn’t seem a smart job.
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I vaguely remember the guy with the foliage on his head…
Usually, stealing money results in people following it and finding it, eventually.
But lemon juice?! Exposed to heat the thing under it becomes visible…we operate at ninety-eight point six degrees… I can get that he never thought of THAT, but didn’t he look in the mirror?
Humans are really good at lying to ourselves. Animals know better.
All the same, this was really fun to read. People are nuts. You can only laugh.
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