Ignorance begets more confidence than knowledge

The "Dunning–Kruger effect" is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. It is a bias attributed to the inability of unskilled or under-educated individuals to recognize their mistakes.

Let's just stop there and look at this in reverse ...

That is to say, "If one can instil in individuals a lack of skills and a lack of education, would that not make them easier to induce an illusionary feeling of superiority as the Brahma Kumaris do?"

The Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward in 1999 by two psychologists Dunning and Kruger who quoted Charles Darwin when he wrote, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge". Or as Bertrand Russell wrote, "One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision"

They found that, for a given skill, incompetent people will

tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are exposed to training for that skill.

As an extreme example, it's even been shown that a person who suffers a physical disability because of brain injury can often be unaware of or deny the existence of the disability, even for dramatic impairments such as blindness or paralysis.

Dunning and Kruger also found that people with true ability tended to underestimate their relative competence and scientists Ames and Kammrath extended the work to study sensitivity towards others and found similar results.

"The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool."