Tag: Dunning–Kruger effect

The new study found that this effect was exacerbated when partisan identities were activated. The latter theory constitutes a central topic in my earlier research, and I was especially interested in whether the partisan mind is susceptible to overconfident self-appraisals of political knowledge.” For his study, Anson examined 2,606 American adults using two online surveys. “Many Americans appear to be extremely overconfident in their political knowledgeability, because they have no way of knowing how little they actually know about the world of politics (this is the so-called ‘double bind of incompetence’). In fact, when I asked partisans to ‘grade’ political knowledge quizzes filled out by fictional members of the other party, low-skilled respondents gave out scores that reflected party biases much more than actual knowledge.” “The results seem to indicate the existence of a widespread failure of political discourse in the United States: when a partisan talks to someone of the out-party, they are pretty likely to misjudge the political knowledgeability of themselves and their conversation partner. More often than not, this means that partisans will think of themselves as far more politically knowledgeable than an out-partisan, even when that person is extremely politically knowledgeable,” Anson told PsyPost. “This study was conducted in an online survey setting, meaning that I was unable to actually assess what happens when partisans converse with one another. To support the conclusions I drew in the study, I gave respondents a simple political knowledge quiz, and then asked them to tell me how well they thought they did,” Anson said. In the future, I think that we could learn many interesting things about political discourse and ‘political overconfidence’ by getting people into a laboratory setting.” Anson realized that he too was subject to the effect while conducting the study. Re-reading the literature on the subject made me acutely aware of my own (lack of) knowledge of the subject, such that I started to seriously second-guess my confidence! It was interesting to read in one of the seminal Dunning-Kruger studies that the authors included a footnote corroborating basically the same experience,” he explained.