IF you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know that you are really, really stupid, said comedian John Cleese.
It is election time. Campaign paraphernalia are annoying. Ads are irritating. Social media is exasperating. And many are resigned that the result is going to be frustrating. To be able to do something, we must first understand.
On social media, we witness how freely anyone can appear like an expert armed with full conviction of expertise and armored by solid confidence in expressing what, in fact, is mere plain and baseless opinion. Social media has given birth to self-professed political analysts. It has become an ocean of opinionated exchanges leading to senseless arguments short of sound logical resolution. The freedom of expression has crossed beyond the border of responsible content and logical context to trigger the battle of reasonable conduct.
Some are simply ignorant, yet proud. Others are aggressively fierce — poised to kill or die — yet stand on meaningless ground. Worse, some are even making a living through digital monetization by simply propagating insubstantial statements of pure ignorance. Others have become successful in generating a flock of its kind blindly applauding their statement enslaved by confirmation bias.
Nonsense discourse fills the air while some members of the competent and thinking class, who cannot tolerate the prevalence of unintelligent discourse, are making an exodus from the toxic social media. The others remain patiently engaged in the futile battle for content, context and conduct, and become the faint voice in the wilderness hoping against hope to make sense.
How can you shun a fool who knows not and knows not that he knows not, as an Arabian quote asks?
The science of stupid
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge (Charles Darwin). The incompetent people are often observed to display inappropriate confidence which in their perspective feels like knowledge. This is scientifically explained by the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a type of cognitive bias named after sociologists-researchers David Dunning and Justin Kruger. Their work is entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (“Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,” 1999). Controversial as it may be, the Dunning-Kruger bias remains a reference to the “science of stupid.”
Dunning and Kruger established data showing that most people believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are. It presents empirical evidence that most people are overconfident about their abilities. Worse, the least competent people are the most overconfident.
Incompetent but overconfident
The incompetent people have a low ability to recognize incompetence. Their low cognitive ability makes them overestimate their own capabilities. This is aggravated by their poor self-awareness. In a harsher but more direct-to-the-point statement — they are too stupid to know about their stupidity.
The researchers found that incompetent people are not only poor performers but are also unable to accurately assess and recognize the quality of their own work. They overestimate their own skill levels. This leads to their failure to recognize their own mistakes, and even the lack of skills. And consequently, they may also fail to recognize the genuine skills and expertise of other people.
Dunning has pointed out that the very knowledge and skills necessary to be good at a task are the exact same qualities that a person needs to recognize that they are not good at that task. So, if a person lacks those abilities, they remain not only bad at that task but ignorant of their own inability.
On the mount of stupid
The incompetent people have the tendency to use mental shortcuts that allow them to make decisions quickly. They engage heuristics — solving problems faster than they would if they did all the computing. They may also find patterns that do not exist.
They lack metacognition — the ability to “think about thinking,” or introspection into one’s own thinking. This leads to a faulty confidence level which to themselves is anchored on a false perspective of having known enough and having thought sufficiently enough. They end up with an illusory superiority, and they are on what Dunning-Kruger refers to as “Mount Stupid” — the basis of the title of this article.
This Dunning-Kruger Effect impacts on what people believe and consequently affect the decisions and the actions they take — like voting.
Competent lack self-belief in the Valley of Despair
Dunning and Kruger found that competent experts actually tend to underestimate their own abilities relative to how others did in what is called the “Valley of Despair.” The competent people hold more realistic views of their own knowledge and capabilities.
The competent individuals may know that they are better than the average — but not convinced of just how superior their performance is compared to others. They tend to believe that everyone else is knowledgeable as well and assume that things they find easy are also easy for others.
Dunning and Kruger suggest that as experience with a subject increases, confidence typically declines to more realistic levels. As people learn more about the topic of interest, they begin to recognize their own lack of knowledge and ability. Then as people gain more information and actually become experts on a topic, their confidence levels begin to improve once again.
Toward the slope of enlightenment
We all have areas of incompetence in our lives. Here is where the Dunning-Kruger Effect may actually apply to all of us. If unchecked, even the experts who are competent and endowed with wisdom may exhibit the Dunning-Kruger Effect in some areas of their lives.
Reimagining elections
Awareness of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is the beginning of our strategy to overcome it. We pass Mount Stupid to cross the Valley of Despair and the Slope of Enlightenment toward what Dunning and Kruger refer to as the Plateau of Sustainability.
Imagine an electorate that breaks assumptions so they can practice critical thinking to dig deeper into social issues that need solutions. Imagine voters who want to gain more reliable information about all the candidates. Imagine the electorate gaining objective feedback and valuable insights into how others perceive other candidates.
We need to confirm what we think we already know about candidates through an objective lens. It will help if we can challenge our beliefs and expectations by seeking new ideas and opening up to new perspectives. Let us be out of the comfort zones of choosing only from among whom we know and discover alternatives.
With neither the intention to label Filipinos as stupid nor the judgment on how others behave (and will behave), may these biases challenge us to act for change. There is dark truth about “vox populi, vox Dei” where democracy respects the majority and be reminded that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for the good men to do nothing” (Edmund Burke) and that “one of the penalties of refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors” (Plato). Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result (Einstein). Let us stop stupidity to stop insanity.
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