What were the origins of the dunce cap?

Believe it or not, dunce caps were originally not for ridicule and punishment but rather to help the brain think better. 13th-century Scottish thinker (seems like an oxymoron there...) John Duns thought a conical cap would stimulate thought and described it as a "thinking cap." It is also believed the image of wizards having pointy conical hats is related to John Duns' philosophy. Somewhere along the way, the hat was turned into a tool of ridicule. Perhaps it started with students who acted pretentious or maybe as a tool to make them somehow wiser.

The Oxford English Dictionary (3rd edition) cites mid-16th century examples of the term dunce used to describe a follower of Duns Scotus, a person engaged in ridiculous pedantry, or a person regarded as a "fool" or "dimwit". A visual depiction of the hat was first shown in the 1727 edition of The New England Primer, and the term dunce's cap is recorded as early as 1791.[9] The first use of the term in literature was in 1840, in Charles Dickens' The Old Curiosity Shop.

https://boingboing.net/2021/06/13/the-occult-history-of-the-dunce-cap.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunce