GELFAND’S WORLD-There's no talking to some people, and now we have an explanation. Actually, we've had the explanation since 1999 but it's taken a while to circulate.
In popular jargon, it's known as the Dunning--Kruger effect, named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger. They found that students who were at the bottom of their classes substantially overestimated how well they were doing. The better students were a lot more accurate in their self-appraisals, even a little overly humble.
The phrase "Dunning--Kruger effect" has been circulating on the internet as a catch-all term for every manner of bad logic spouted by all manner of cranks and charlatans. The broader version of the Dunning--Kruger effect also makes itself known in politics, just to mention one obvious realm where the intellectually impaired are full of self-righteous self-confidence.
Dunning and Kruger postulated that there is a "double curse" so to speak. The failure to understand how to think logically makes it more difficult for such people to recognize when they are failing, because they don't understand what goes into a logical answer.
You can find a readable summary of the effect in Wikipedia, and a summary abstract available in a review by Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, and Kruger in Current Directions in Psychological Science.
It's interesting that in the college setting, Dunning and Kruger could get the lower performing students to gain a better understanding of their inadequacies. They accomplished this by teaching those same students principles of logical thinking. The students then realized (at least some of them, anyway) that they had been making mistakes right along, and when invited to reevaluate themselves, downgraded their performances.
The authors pointed out that this is a bit paradoxical, in that making the students better by teaching them logical skills caused the students to change their self-evaluations in a negative direction. Maybe it's not that paradoxical after all, in that forcing students to confront their own inadequacies, to the extent that it is effective, will cause all but the seriously deluded to gain a little self-insight.
In other words, Dunning and Kruger seem to have shown that in the controlled confines of the undergraduate college, where students are under compulsion to listen and have some ability to learn, the Dunning--Kruger effect seems to be at least partially treatable.
It's in our real world that we have reason for concern, there being no such compulsion to listen and learn.
One obvious example is the angry response in some circles to the assertion that there is such a thing as global warming, and that human action is a major part of it. I'm not talking about complicated scientific arguments over the nuances -- whether the prediction is for two degrees or five degrees average change -- or even over how seriously this would impact civilization. I think it's possible to have these discussions, right alongside discussions about how to prepare for summer temperatures of 125 degrees in the San Fernando Valley in a few decades.
But there is a difference between carrying on a rational discussion and burying one's head in the sand. And if you think about the topic carefully, you can see that there is a whole series of logical errors that are required before somebody ends up in a serious case of denial.
Perhaps the primary error is to deny to oneself that there is, after all, a serious scientific question that has to be answered. It has to be confronted because to avoid the question is to endanger the future of civilization and millions of species.
The second logical error is to fail to admit that most of us are not competent to answer the question. Some of us have the native ability to learn the science, but don't choose to devote our lives to this branch of learning. Some of us have to admit to ourselves that we wouldn't be very good at this branch of science, it being mathematical and complicated. That puts us in the position of having to make a judgment about who we can trust. Most scientifically literate people understand that when a strong consensus of the real experts comes to a conclusion, even a tentative one, we need to give it the credence it deserves.
That doesn't mean that we expect every such consensus to survive unscathed for endless decades, but it does mean that lacking a better, more informed view, this is the one to buy into.
And we have lots of empirical and theoretical experience to support this view. Newton's laws of motion have been with us for several hundred years. Maxwell's equations have been around for a century and a half. One is valid except in the case of relativistic velocities, and the other is valid even then.
Compare these approaches with global warming denialists. The arguments, such as they are, seem to come down to a snit-fit about the result, because that result leads to some uncomfortable conclusions. And in order to provide a little rhetorical cover to that anti-intellectual snit-fit, the deniers accuse the climate experts of having mercenary motives. They recite a little chant to the effect that scientists have to stay within the confines of established dogma in order to get grant funding.
This whole argument manages to avoid the question of how established dogma would have come into existence. The fact that it's not dogma, but a collection of carefully weighed evidence pointing to predictable conclusions, that part is lost on them.
{module [862]} {module [662]}
But to miss all of these points is the result of a broader societal Dunning--Kruger effect, one in which the deniers are blissfully unaware of their own deficiencies.
One of those deficiencies is to substitute wishful thinking for rational thought. Put it this way -- I would very much prefer that we didn't have global warming, but an honest, rational appraisal informs me that we probably do.
I've gone on quite a bit with the global warming story in order to illustrate the way the Dunning--Kruger effect, at one time an academic exercise, has been extended by non-psychologists into the real world setting. But there are obviously lots more examples, everything from the thoughts coming out of the mouths of local politicians to the latest incarnation of education theory. I should also point out that the Dunning--Kruger effect is not confined to any one political viewpoint. There is plenty of illogic to go around, on all points of the political compass.
I should also caution that not every person who disagrees with you or me is a victim of the Dunning--Kruger effect. We can have reasonable disagreements. But this depends on an underlying agreement, that participants accept logic and honest discourse, and have the ability to use logic in an honest way.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for City Watch. He can be reached at [email protected])
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 55
Pub: Jul 8, 2014