Tag Archives: Dunning-Kruger Effect

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect

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[A 2016 piece originally titled “Happily Misinformed” cites a feature of our age that seems even more appropriate now than when it was first published. How can we explain people who hold ersatz opinions in contradiction to established facts and evidence?  Here’s an updated version of that piece.]

In his sobering 1989 study, Democracy Without Citizens, Robert Entman dwells on the irony of living in an information-rich age among uninformed citizens.  There is a rich paradox to a culture where most members have a vast virtual library available on their computer, yet would struggle to pass a third grade civics test.  According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center, only one in three Americans can name our three branches of government. And only the same lone third could identify the party that controls each of the two houses of Congress. Fully a fifth of their sample thought that close decisions in the Supreme Court were sent to Congress to be settled.

Add in the dismal results of map literacy tests of high school and college students (“Where is Africa?,”  “Identify your city on this map”), and we have just a few markers of a failed information society.

As Entman noted, “computer and communication technology has enhanced the ability to obtain and transmit information rapidly and accurately,” but “the public’s knowledge of facts or reality have actually deteriorated.”  The result is “more political fantasy and myth transmitted by the very same news media.” We seem to live comfortably without even elementary understandings of forces that effect our lives.

This condition is sometimes identified as a feature of the Dunning-Kruger effect, a peculiarly distressing form of functional ignorance observed by two Cornell psychologists.  Their basic idea is that many of us seem not to be bothered by what we don’t know, producing a level of ignorance that allows us to overestimate our knowledge.  Dunning and Kruger found that “incompetent” individuals (those falling into the lowest quartile of knowledge on a subject) often failed to recognize their own lack of skill, failed to recognize the extent to which they were misinformed, and did not to accurately gauge the skills of others. In short, a person’s ignorance can actually increase rather than decrease their informational confidence. If you have an Uncle Fred who is certain that former President Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya, or that vaccines cause autism, you have an idea of what kind of willful ignorance this represents.

The Boundaries of the Unknown Grow the More We Know

Think of this pattern in an inverted sense: from the perspective of individuals who truly know what they are talking about.  Even for the well-informed, the more they know about a subject, the larger the circumference of the boundaries that delineate the unknown.  It takes considerable knowledge to know what you don’t know. That’s why those who have mastered a subject area are often the most humble about their expertise: their expanded understanding of a field give them a sense of the many areas that remain to be explored.

All of this makes listening to the truly ignorant a measure of our forbearance.  We are left to vicariously know the shame of someone who is not smart enough to feel it. As with our President, we wonder why he doesn’t feel more embarrassment for his exaggerations and  falsehoods.  Has he never really read about the substantive policy accomplishments of F.D.R (the FDIC, Social Security) or L.B.J.? (successful anti-poverty programs, the Civil Rights acts of 1964 or 1965).  Can slapping on tariffs for goods and subverting long-standing values of equality and fairness be enough to count as great leadership?

The Dunning-Kruger Effect shows it self in other ways as well. A key factor is our distraction by all forms of media—everything from texting to empty-headed television programming—that leaves us with little available time to be contributing members of the community.   When the norm is checking our phones over 100 times a day, we have perhaps reached a tipping point where we have no time or energy left to fill in our own informational black holes.

The idea of citizenship should mean more.  In this coming election cycle it’s worth remembering that nearly half of eligible voters will probably not bother to vote.  And even more will have no interest in learning about president and legislative candidates.  Worst still, this is all happening at a time when candidates have been captured by a reality-show logic that substitutes melodrama for more sober discussions of  how they intend to govern.  Put it altogether, and its clear that too many of us don’t notice that we are engrossed with a sideshow rather than the main event.

The Limits of Forbearance

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                                           Pixabay

It remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President: how long it will be before their forbearance for the man who can’t fill the part is tapped out.

This site is all about maximizing the chances for success in connecting with others. But if we flip that goal over, we get an equally interesting effect by testing the limits of behavior a mile wide of the norm.

I’ve been thinking about this watching television news people on cable networks, trying not to register shock that the President of the United States has just trashed another convention of the presidency.  News people are expert for keeping calm in the presence of disorder and rudeness. Serious and accomplished reporters can be very good for taking any act and trying to place it into a context that normalizes it for the beat they are covering.  This is partly a function of their self-definitions as professional observers.

Those of us with shorter fuses may not have this kind of professional elan.  But that’s what forbearance gives us: the use of euphemism and “just the facts” to keep an offensive act from devolving into a comedy of manners.

 We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic  examples of “presidential rhetoric.”

It’s not too much to say that this President has seriously undermined the conventional role functions of the Presidency.  We would never think to associate public acts so careless and random as authentic  examples of “presidential rhetoric.”  But we’ve had over fifty days of them, and then on one recent Saturday:  an astonishing and libelous tweet accusing President Obama of tapping phones at Trump Tower, followed minutes later by  a second missive expressing giddy delight that a reality star was cancelling his show. These rants came a few days after Trump gave us the wide-eyed and definitive insight that “Nobody knew that health care could be so complicated.”

Nobody? That must have struck analysts and experts in three previous administrations as news.  No one else had apparently been able to grasp the complexities of American health care.

These combined responses and many more like them seem like evidence for what’s known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a condition where an individual with limited competencies lacks even the capacity to understand how limited they are.  No wonder one of the dominant tropes emerging in the coverage of this president is of a man-child.

Donald Trump’s over 500 angry, misspelled and boorish Tweets alone would have disqualified him for leadership in most large organizations.  Can we assume that one day these rhetorical ejaculations will greet visitors at his Presidential library?

To be sure, we grant every White House occupant some non-presidential moments: Nixon angrily shoving his press secretary toward journalists, Johnson showing photographers a surgery scar on his fat belly, Ford diving head-first down the stairs of his airplane, Clinton lying about his relations with Monica Lewinsky, George W. Bush commenting at a press conference on the British Prime Minister’s brand of toothpaste.

But nothing has scratched the mostly pristine finish of the institutional Presidency like Trump. He has entire seizures of misdirected utterance and grotesque overstatement. His willful ignorance, bluster and conspiracy-mongering, are not just unpresidential, but anti-presidential. His penchant for turning almost every claim into an accusation and most statements into shaky affirmations of his fragile ego has made his short tenure an unintended psychodrama: an embarrassment to be endured.  His first address to Congress showed that he can follow linear thinking if it is fully scripted.  Yet he seems uninterested in the kinds of details and substantive exchanges that the press and public long for.  So it remains to be seen how long Americans will accept a drama queen as President.  Like a school play, the mishaps and miscues are sometimes funny.  But how long  will we accept this bad actor before our forbearance is tapped out?

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Gary C. Woodward has written about the Presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.