What They Think They Know Makes Trump Supporters Dangerous

By SAM URETSKY

In 1999 Justin Kruger and David Dunning published one of the most important papers in modern psychology, “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The authors wrote, “People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.“

The Dunning-Kruger Effect simply states that people over-estimate their abilities because of lack of knowledge of the full extent of the subject. Writing in Pacific Standard, Prof Dunning wrote “To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent.” In contrast, true experts don’t appreciate the extent of their own expertise and consider themselves no better than average.

Vice News helpfully put together a video of Donald Trump assuring a loyal public of his areas of superiority. Once we’ve heard that President Trump is the foremost authority on infrastructure, debt, taxes, trade, visas and wall building, while also assuring us that nobody respects women, fights for veterans, or is better at helping the disabled and a few other things, it’s possible to believe that Mr. Trump is the very model of a modern major-general.

It is a matter of record that in January, President Trump passed the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), a test for dementia. This test, which involves repeating lists of words, counting backwards from 100 by 7s, or tapping when the doctor says the letter “A.” Unfortunately, there are other emotional problems that MoCA doesn’t cover. President Trump shows clear signs of xenophobia, which, meaning “fear of strangers” is as close as you can come to fear of immigrants. He also shows clear signs of chloephobia, which is fear of newspapers. Finally, he seems to have either alethephobia or veritaphobia, since both words mean the same thing: fear of the truth. (Both words seem to be widely used on the Internet but don’t appear in the on-line versions of either Merriam-Webster or Oxford dictionaries). This isn’t really a problem since according to President Trump “I have the best words.”

Professor Dunning has summed it up as “… the knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at that task.” This explains a great deal of President Trump’s behavior, but what accounts for the fact that many voters actually voted for Donald Trump, and some still support him. The answer to this seems to be, once again, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. We’re all incompetent at something, and so we’re all at risk of overestimating our abilities.

The competent voter is familiar with the issues and the positions of the candidates. To achieve competence, the voter must have reliable sources of information. In 2014, the Pew Charitable Trusts studied the news sources used by both Republicans and Democrats. Among consistent Republicans, 47% relied almost solely on Fox News, and considered it objective.

During the 2016 election, these voters continued the same pattern, adding only reliance on then-candidate Trump’s tweets. Over the same period, consistent Democrats had no single source, but relied on CNN, NPR, MSNBC and the New York Times. In January 2018, the Knight Foundation offered a follow-up “American Views: Trust, Media and Democracy.”

This report went into a great deal of detail, including, “Less than half of Americans, 44%, say they can think of a news source that reports the news objectively. Republicans who can name an accurate source overwhelmingly mention Fox News®, while Democrats’ responses are more varied.” These results were consistent with the earlier Pew findings. Media Bias/Factcheck reported, “we rate Fox News strongly Right-Biased due to word and story selection that favors the right and mixed factually based on poor sourcing and spreading conspiracy theories that later must be retracted.”

In contrast, the same source found the New York Times “… Left-Center biased based on word and story selection that favors the left, but highly factual and considered one of the most reliable sources for information due to proper sourcing and well respected journalists/editors.” The Washington Post was also found to have a modest left bias but overall high credibility.

In other words, Trump supporters believe they have sufficient information to cast an informed vote. The results of the election show otherwise.

Sam Uretsky is a writer and pharmacist living in New York. Email sdu01@outlook.com.

From The Progressive Populist, August 1, 2018

Populist.com