Manipulating and tricking people isn't easy; one reason why is that there is no guarantee that the target of manipulation or trickery will fall for it. Even if the target of manipulation is stupid, naïve, or gullible, and the manipulator is intelligent, there is always the possibility that the target of manipulation will see through it and catch the would-be manipulator off-guard.
The reason why someone might underestimate another's intelligence can vary; perhaps the manipulator looks down on the manipulated party for one reason or another and assumes them to be easily tricked; for example, an old person might assume that a younger person is easily manipulated because of their lack of experience. Someone who's skilled at manipulating others might get cocky and assume that no one can see through them, and end up being caught off guard when someone they tried to dupe does just that.
In some cases, the target is genuinely stupid, but not as stupid as the would-be manipulator thinks; perhaps the manipulator puts so little effort into their manipulation that their target easily sees through them. If the target used to be stupid but became wiser, then the manipulator might assume that their target is the same idiot they always were, and will become blindsided when someone they could once trick now sees right through them.
There are some rare cases where the manipulator knows the person they are trying to outwit is intelligent, but underestimates just how smart they are; if a person tries to outthink a smart person's plan, they might fail to take into account that said smart person could have contingency plans. Someone who's arrogant might acknowledge someone's intelligence but also overestimate their own intelligence so greatly that they underestimate their intelligent foe. When said foe exploits this for a scam of their own, you are looking at a Kansas City Shuffle.
Intellectual counterpart to Underestimating Badassery. Compare Out-Gambitted. This is a common blunder by people who are either Too Clever by Half, an Insufferable Genius, or a Know-Nothing Know-It-All. Overlaps with It Can Think if a person assumes the being they are trying to trick is only a mindless beast. Nobody's That Dumb is a common reason why stupid characters don't fall for the deception.
Can sometimes overlap with Smarter Than You Look. Contrast Seemingly Profound Fool and Mistaken for Profound, which involve people's intelligence being overestimated. Also contrast Too Dumb to Fool, where it is because someone is dumb that the manipulation fails.
Note: If the "underestimated" guy actually attempts to hide their knowledge/intelligence by pretending to be stupid, then the trope is Obfuscating Stupidity. This trope only requires another person to underestimate someone's intelligence, without considering whether the latter actively hides it or not.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Lady!!: Thomas shoots Alexandra while Lynn and Edward are riding hernote , causing her to screech in pain and throw them off her back. Because Edward is injured and Lynn isn't, Thomas and Mary get away with blaming Lynn for the incident. However, it didn't occur to them that the bullet Thomas shot would still be in the garden, and eventually Arthur finds it and proves Lynn's innocence.
Fan Works
- In The Ghosts of Bayville
, after Dash tells Duncan that he and the other A-Listers back in Casper High used to bully people into doing their homework, Duncan warns Dash not to try that at Bayville High, since the teachers aren't dumb enough to fall for it. Duncan is proven right when the teachers see right through Dash's lies.
- In The Loud House fanfic The Godsisters, Lincoln tries to trick his sister Leni by lying that she owes him money rather than the other way around. However, she doesn't fall for it; she may be a Dumb Blonde but even she isn't that dumb.
- Inter Nos: Alyssa tells Shizuru that her cousin, Natsuki, is frequently underestimated because despite her prowess in battle, her Speech Impediment and Elective Mute tendencies prevent her from sharing in the oral traditions of the Otomeian people, and so despite being fluent in several languages, and incredibly well-read, only Alyssa, her father King Kruger, and her direct subordinates in the elite Lupine Division think of her as having a keen mind.
- Knight of Salem (RWBY): Sienna Khan interprets Salem as a ridiculously powerful but delusional and simple-minded psychopathic womanchild, and so she becomes confident that she can use some fairly simple and less-than-opaque politicking to wrap Salem around her finger. What Sienna doesn't realize is that while Salem is a psychopathic womanchild, she was also an actual queen with all of the politicking that entailed for centuries, so she sees right through Sienna's efforts and doesn't take kindly to them.
- Origin Story: It's mentioned at least once that part of the reason why Spider-Man's such a successful hero is because people (especially his villains) tend to forget how smart he actually is (being just a few college credits short of having two doctorates).
- Purple Days (A Song of Ice and Fire): Joffrey, after centuries of enduring his "Groundhog Day" Loop, paying for his mistakes, and witnessing the end of the world by the Others over and over again have completely reshaped Joffrey from the psychopathic, idiot spoiled brat he started out as into a very intelligent and compassionate person. Because of who Joffrey was before he began looping, everyone around him at the start of his loops naturally sees and treats him as an idiot green boy who can be easily manipulated to their own political agendas, and they — particularly Cersei and Baelish — are blindsided when it's as if Joffrey suddenly woke up one morning with a radically different personality to the brat they're used to and the ability to see right through them.
- The Harry Potter fanfic What Was Your Plan deconstructs the "Evil Manipulative Dumbledore" trope by having Harry do this; most fics that have Dumbledore be an evil mastermind have his plans falling apart as soon as Harry figures out what's going on. Here, Harry confronting Dumbledore about how he's wise to his true nature proves to be his undoing, as Harry failed to take into account that someone who's been manipulating people for years would likely have contingencies in place just in case their pawn(s) caught on.
Films — Animated
- Cars: After Lightning McQueen is sentenced to fixing the main road in Radiator Springs, he tries to escape by waiting for Mater to remove his clamp before speeding off out of town. However, once he reaches the town border he suddenly runs out of gas and finds Sheriff and Sally waiting there to bring him back. Turns out they knew he'd try that and siphoned his gas while he was knocked out earlier.
Sheriff: Boy, we're not as dumb as you think we are.
Films — Live-Action
- L.A. Confidential: Everyone thinks Bud White is a mere Dumb Muscle, including Bud himself, and the Big Bad Dudley Smith assumes he'll be an easily duped pawn. Bud turns out to be a very intelligent and skilled detective and helps stop the villains' schemes.
- Legally Blonde: At the beginning of the film, a saleswoman tries to sell Elle an old, discounted dress as a full-price, one-of-a-kind dress, seeing her as a rich, Dumb Blonde who is irresponsible with money. Elle instead catches her in a lie about the fabric and mentions having seen it in Vogue a whole year before, humiliating the saleswoman. This foreshadows that Elle is a lot smarter than most give her credit for.
- MonsterVerse:
- Kong: Skull Island: This happens at the climax of the movie when a character unsuccessfully attempts to outwit a monster that turns out to have the intelligence needed to catch onto his game. Captain Earl Cole tries to bait the Skull Devil into eating him while he's holding an armed grenade. Unfortunately, the Skull Devil realizes something is up by how Cole is walking right up to it instead of running away, and it tail slaps him away from itself, rendering his attempted sacrifice pointless.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters: One of the main reasons why the eco-terrorists' plan to manipulate the awakened Titans into culling humanity's overpopulation and restoring the Earth's ecosphere goes horribly awry is because the terrorists assume that all the Titans will just do what the eco-terrorists want them to after awakening them. The eco-terrorists are using the ORCA to try and manipulate the awakened Titans' behavior by communicating with them in a dominant "Alpha Titan" bio-acoustic frequency, but one of the Titans, Ghidorah, is (a) himself an Alpha Titan who is visibly intelligent and aware, and who can defy the ORCA's alpha frequency if he chooses to; and (b) Ghidorah has absolutely no intention of restoring Earth's biosphere or letting any remnants of the human race survive his rampage like the eco-terrorists wanted to. Instead of doing what the ORCA commands him to, Ghidorah only reacts to the eco-terrorists' alpha frequency with murderous violence due to him recognizing the signal as a threat to his own aims: of reigning supreme over the non-Alpha Titans by himself and wiping the Earth clean of life.
Literature
- In the official novelization of Godzilla (2014), one of the fighter jet pilots deployed to try and kill the male MUTO on Hawaii is completely shocked and baffled when the creature has the intelligence and problem-solving necessary to weaponize its EMP-generating ability against the fighter jets and cause them to crash — the pilot mentally screams in his dying moments that the MUTO is just an animal that shouldn't be able to outsmart them like that.
- Harry Potter: Because House-Elves tend to be subservient to their masters, many wizards and witches tend to see them as gullible and easy to manipulate (including Hermione, who sees them as “brainwashed and uneducated” to like being subservient), but the fifth book shows that this isn’t true. The House-Elves working at Hogwarts easily see through Hermione’s attempt to trick them into freeing themselves, and Kreacher manages to use Exact Words by deliberately interpreting Sirius’ Get Out! command as an order to “get out of Grimmauld Place”, allowing him to conspire with the Death Eaters.
Live-Action TV
- This is the most common flaw of Columbo villains, as they often see Columbo's shabby dressing and absent-minded nature and assume he couldn't be smart enough to solve the murders they commit. It's only a short time into the investigation that they end up seeing how sly Columbo actually is, usually spelling their doom.
- Hannah Montana has an episode where a harsh critic named Barney Bitman, played by Gilbert Gottfried, is going to be reviewing the titular character. In order to help her avoid this, her brother, Jackson comes up with a plan to dress up as Ozzy Osbourne and trick the critic into coming with him. It looks like it might work until...
Barney: Okay, I'll go but, uh, just one question. (takes off Jackson's wig) HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK I AM?Jackson: (still acting) I-I was hoping a lot.
- Legends of Tomorrow: Throughout the second season, Eobard Thawne/Reverse Flash has nothing but disdain for the Legends, thinking they're little more than a nuisance. In "Fellowship of the Spear", he is left completely flat-footed when the Legends steal the fragments of the Spear of Destiny from under his nose, only able to mutter that they "aren't smart enough" to pull off such a strategy.
- Leverage: Lampshaded in "The Zanzibar Marketplace Job" when Eliot points out that he'd figured out who the mastermind behind the theft of the Faberge Egg was because when they'd shown the video for the stolen egg for the auction, there was no sound, but when they showed the video of the captive Nate, Maggie, and Sam, the sound was suddenly turned on. Why? So they could hear Sam's "performance" setting up his boss Alexander Lundy as the fall guy. Maggie notes, suitably impressed, that people underestimated him. Nate says that's precisely the point.
Video Games
- In Far Cry 3, as part of his efforts to bring down Hoyt Volker, Jason Brody teams up with Sam Becker, The Mole in Hoyt's Privateers, and tries going undercover among the Privateers himself, trusting that given how many people Hoyt has taken captive to sell as slaves, he won't recognize or remember Jason's face. Part of his attempt to do this consists of torturing his younger brother Riley (whom Hoyt is keeping prisoner) in order to maintain his cover, while Sam tries sabotaging the cell's CCTV to make sure Hoyt doesn't overhear Jason breaking character to fill his brother in on what's going on. Afterwards, an impressed Hoyt invites both Jason and Sam to a game of poker, and they tag along, Sam bringing a knife hidden in his boot so that he can kill Hoyt when the game hits a lull. However, around that time, it's Hoyt who stabs Sam to death instead, after which he then reveals that he does remember Jason's face from looking at him inside a cage at the start of the game, so his false identity of "Foster" didn't fool Hoyt at all, because the South African kingpin knew who he was and what he and Sam planned to do to him all along. As Hoyt himself puts it, "HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK I AM?!"
- Knights of the Old Republic: Should you accept the Genoharadan's offer of membership, one of the targets you're hired to eliminate is Vorn Dasraad, a brutal Gamorrean bounty hunter. Because Gamorreans are commonly stereotyped as Dumb Muscle, you have the option of planting a mine on his speeder or reprogramming his assault droid to attack him, assuming he'll just blunder into your trap. However, Vorn isn't fooled: he'll immediately notice the sabotage in either case, easily undo your handiwork, and then go hunting for you. It's later revealed that Vorn is actually one of the Genoharadan's four Overseers — and the Genoharadan accept only the best.
Visual Novels
- Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney: This is essentially how Alita Tiala's plan to frame Wocky Kitaki for the murder she committed fell apart; Alita hired Apollo under the assumption that since he is a rookie defense attorney with only one case under his belt, it meant that he was too incompetent to properly defend Wocky. Unfortunately for Alita, not only was Apollo smart enough to be able to find Wocky innocent, he was also able to deduce that Alita was the real murderer.
Web Animation
- Etra chan saw it!: Akane is having an affair with a married man, and thinks she won't get caught despite her bragging about it because she thinks his wife is stupid. Three months later, Akane whines to her friends, who tried to warn her to end the affair, that the wife found out and sued her.
Web Videos
- Sword Art Online Abridged: Yolko and Kains fake their deaths to try and manipulate Schmitt into confessing to the murder of Griselda. They didn't expect Kirito and Asuna to get involved, but they figured they could fool them into their scheme as well, given the intelligence of the average SAO player. Unfortunately, Kirito is an Insufferable Genius, and he figures out what they're up to.
Yolko: How did you realize I was lying?Kirito: Ah, well, that part was quite simple. You see... I'm not an idiot.Kains: Yeah, that'll do it.
Western Animation
- One episode of The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 averts Paper-Thin Disguise by having Mario and Luigi disguising themselves as two Sledge Bros., with their disguises doing nothing to hide their faces. Unfortunately for the Mario Bros., the very first Sledge Bro that sees them recognizes them on sight.
Sledge Bro: Putting on a little weight aren't ya, Mario?
- Atomic Betty: In "Space Brains", Maximus IQ has Sparky compete in the titular intergalactic game show and try to trick him into answering a question about where Betty’s homeworld is located, so he can destroy it. However, when Sparky is asked that question by gameshow host Captain Chuck, he answers that if he told where the secret location of Atomic Betty’s homeworld is, it wouldn’t be a secret anymore. Ironically, Captain Chuck accepts that answer, and Sparky wins the competition, to Maximus’ horror.
- The Dragon Prince:
- Soren, is tragically underestimated by his own family when he tries to tell his sister their father, Viren, wanted him to get rid of their friends, Callum and Ezran, to seize the throne for himself, Viren successfully gaslights Claudia into thinking Soren misunderstood what he said, which she is more willing to belief both out of denial and because Soren, while a skilled swordsman, is also a bit dense. However, he later proves critical in thwarting his father by freeing Ezran and fully defecting to them once he sees his dad for the villain he is and that he must be stopped before he can grow more powerful.
- The Pirate Finnegrin frequently insults and demeans his wood golem, Deadwood, thinking him too dumb to ever disobey him, despite being immune to his most effective means of coercion, freezing the blood in someone's veins. This backfires tremendously when Soren inspires Deadwood to throw Finnegrin into a leviathans mouth, definitely saying his real name; Elmer.
- Ed, Edd n Eddy: In "Once Bitten, Twice Ed," Eddy believes that he can easily trick The Kids into falling for the same scam simply by tweaking it every time it fails. Eddy almost tricks them the first two times, but by the third time, they've caught on and stop coming, but Eddy stubbornly sticks to his strategy of tweaking the scam, assuming that the kids will eventually fall for it.
- Looney Tunes: In the cartoons that pit Wile E. Coyote against Bugs Bunny, Wile E. considers himself a genius — scratch that, a super genius — and thinks a mere rabbit is no match for him intellectually. Bugs, naturally, proves him wrong time and again.
- Miraculous Ladybug:
- In "Revelation", Gabriel Agreste fires Lila Rossi from the ad campaign for his Alliance, intending to replace her with his son Adrien and Kagami Tsurugi, the daughter of his business partner. While he fully expects her to seek revenge against him, and thus declines to akumatize her at that moment, when she later turns her wrath against Marinette Dupain-Cheng for an unrelated slight, he does akumatize her, figuring that she'll be distracted from her grudge against him. This turns out to be false; her subsequent rampage is actually a ruse to distract him while she manipulates his assistant Nathalie into raiding his personal safe, allowing her to obtain proof that he's the villain Monarch.
- In "Confrontation", Lila and Chloé hatch a plan to sabotage their classmates' applications for high school and then blame it on Marinette. The plan relies upon Sabrina forging documents, but they aren't especially concerned about that, because Sabrina is neither particularly clever nor very brave, so she dutifully forges all the documents for them, What they fail to account for is that while Sabrina isn't clever, she is smart enough to call up Marinette for advice, and Marinette concocts a plan that only requires Sabrina to react the way she normally does under stress in order to lead Chloé and Lila into an Engineered Public Confession.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: In "Plankton!," Plankton tries to manipulate SpongeBob into giving him a Krabby Patty by claiming it's his birthday tomorrow. While The Ditz SpongeBob isn't exactly a genius, he is smart enough to realize that Plankton is trying to get his hands on the Krabby Patty formula, much to Plankton's surprise.
Plankton: Gee, and I thought you were stupid.
- The Transformers: In the episode "Prime Target", Lord Chumly tries to take advantage of Optimus’ Chronic Hero Syndrome by using a seemingly chained-up woman begging for help. However, to Chumly’s surprise, Optimus doesn’t fall for it, as the woman turns out to be a hologram to trigger a booby trap. Something that Blitzwing finds out the hard way.
- Transformers: Prime: Both the Autobots and Decepticons underestimate just how intelligent Predaking is. First, he easily sees through Wheeljack's Feed It a Bomb attempt and bats the grenade away with his tail. Starscream, meanwhile, uses a terminal on the Nemesis in front of Predaking because he doesn't realize that the Predacon understands what he's doing and is busy memorizing his password. Even Shockwave mistakes how smart Predaking actually is and is caught by surprise when Predaking chooses to reveal it.
