Tom Stafford
Mind Hacks
I have a guest post for the Research Digest, snappily titled ‘People
who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to
overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn
more‘. The paper I review is about the so-called “belief
superiority” effect, which is defined by thinking that your views are
better than other people’s (i.e. not just that you are right, but that
other people are wrong). The finding that people who have belief
superiority are more likely to overestimate their knowledge is a twist
on the famous Dunning-Kruger
phenomenon, but showing that it isn’t just ignorance that predicts
overconfidence, but also the specific belief that everyone else has
mistaken beliefs.
Here’s the first lines of the Research Digest piece:
We all know someone who is convinced their opinion is
better than everyone else’s on a topic – perhaps, even, that it is the
only correct opinion to have. Maybe, on some topics, you are that
person. No psychologist would be surprised that people who are
convinced their beliefs are superior think they are better informed than
others, but this fact leads to a follow on question: are people actually
better informed on the topics for which they are convinced their
opinion is superior? This is what Michael Hall and Kaitlin Raimi set out
to check in a series of experiments in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
Read more here: ‘People
who think their opinions are superior to others are most prone to
overestimating their relevant knowledge and ignoring chances to learn
more‘
Daisy Luther
The Organic Prepper
It's time to address an epidemic in the United States. It's one that could be deadly, particularly to liberty. It's an epidemic of Dunning-Kruger. It's why ignorant people are so certain that they're right.
What's that, you ask?
The Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which individuals, who are unskilled at a particular task, believe themselves to possess above-average ability in performing the task. On the other hand, as individuals become more skilled in a particular task, they may mistakenly believe that they possess below-average ability in performing those tasks because they may assume that all others possess equal or greater ability. In other words, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others." (source)
And haven't we all seen that lately? Let's look at a recent example right here in the good ole USA.
Those who haven't lived like the rest of us are the ones shouting the loudest.
Let's start with the current gun control debate.
We have high school kids who think they are experts on policy, firearms, and the Constitution, smugly telling us how clueless they believe we are.
We have movie stars who make millions from movies where they shoot people and who are protected by armed security guards, telling us that we law-abiding citizens who have guns are vicariously responsible for every school shooting that has ever happened.
We have wealthy city dwellers who live in buildings with doormen telling the rest of us that we're nuts for wanting to protect ourselves. And all of these people who want to loudly tell the rest of us how to live our lives have one thing in common: they are completely out of touch with the real world.
Read more
