Stupid People Think They're Smart

It has been brought to my attention that people are unaware of studies on the limits of intelligence self assessment, like this one:

There is another way in which people fail to have available all the information they need to provide accurate self-judgments – and this deficit in information may hit hardest those most in need of revising their self-views. Often, to judge one's own or another person's choices, one needs to know the proper way in which a choice should be made. For example, suppose one were asked to judge whether another person's conclusion is logically sound. To provide an accurate judgment, one would have to have a pretty good grasp of the rules of logic. But what about those who fail to have such a grasp? Can they adequately judge?

Kruger and Dunning (1999; see also Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Kruger, 2003; Ehrlinger, Johnson, Dunning, Kruger, & Banner, forthcoming; Haun, Zeringue, Leach, & Foley, 2000) suggested that people who do not have such expertise cannot judge accurately – either themselves or another person. Specifically, Kruger and Dunning argued, with data, that people who suffer from a deficit of expertise or knowledge in many intellectual or social domains fall prey to a dual curse. First, their deficits lead them to make many mistakes, perform worse than other people, and, in a word, suffer from incompetence. But, second, those exact same deficits mean that they cannot judge competence either. Because they choose what they think are the best responses to situations, they think they are doing just fine when, in fact, their responses are fraught with error. Indeed, if they had the expertise necessary to recognize their mistakes, they would not have made them in the first place.

Or to put it another way, stupid people don't know that they're stupid.

I think we could probably imagine a set of skill, like using a computer, that it's pretty easy to know if you're any good at or not. And we could imagine another set of skills, like a sense of humor, that are notoriously difficult to self-assess. Stuff like driving a car, doing math problems, and recalling people's names falls into a spectrum between those two examples.

People vary, but probably the greatest indicator of whether or not someone is very stupid is if they aren't funny but think they're hilarious, or if they have awful taste. So, you are not wrong to screen dates based on whether they prefer George Carlin or Larry the Cable Guy.

Politics, which made me think of this, is a horse of a different color though, as there are fact/value distinctions. It's possible to imagine a person who completely understand the Republican agenda, for example, and still favors it on the merits, but this person's values are just going to be different than most people's (Dick Cheney, for example).

Most people, of course, don't really take the time to analyze every single thing their politicians do. Most people have one or a few issues that they really care about, pick the party that agrees with them on the things they "know", and then trust that party to be right on the stuff they don't know (even if they don't realize this is happening). And this is why pro-lifers support the party that has spent the last five years reigning death on innocents in Iraq. Now these people are in a very difficult position, having no real knowledge or understanding of foreign policy (foreign policy is very hard to understand, I might add*), so they end up making very stupid arguments advancing their position. And because of the way humans self-assess, they don't even know how stupid they are.