By Joel McDurmon on Mar 1, 2012
Livescience.com comments on a report by David Dunning, a research psychologist at Cornell, which “shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas.”
For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.
As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.
He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people’s ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as “above average” — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile.
The reason for this disconnect is simple: “If you have gaps in your knowledge in a given area, then you’re not in a position to assess your own gaps or the gaps of others,” Dunning said. . . .
The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise.
This study essentially reviews the old lesson of philosophy: it is not so terrible if you don’t know something, but it is vital to know that you don’t know. It is vital to have the humility to admit when you don’t know. This is the more egregious offense at the heart of this problem which the report does not address: it’s not the ignorance itself that’s the problem, it’s the pride and other spiritual flaws that prevent people simply from saying “I don’t know.”
