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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsDonald Trump, the Dunning-Kruger President
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/why-donald-trump-will-be-the-dunning-kruger-president.html?mid=fb-share-scienceofusDonald Trump, the Dunning-Kruger President
By Jessica Pressler
Ever since Donald J. Trump was elected president, David Dunnings phone has been ringing off the hook. Dunning, a social psychologist, is one of the lead authors of Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing Ones Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology based on the results of a study he and a student, Justin Kruger, conducted at Cornell in 1999. As the title suggests, what they found was the existence of a cognitive bias in which the less able people are, the more likely they are to overestimate their abilities. Or as Dunning put it recently over the phone from the University of Michigan, where he now teaches: People dont know what they dont know.
The Dunning-Kruger effect, as it came to be known, was an immediate hit with armchair psychologists: Everyone knows someone they could diagnose as too dumb to even know it. Eighteen years later, the concept has achieved a kind of steady virality online, not only because the internets atmosphere an incredible Wild West of misinformation, as Dunning puts it has made it possible for anyone to posture as an expert, but because it is the preferred platform for people to call one another idiots. As a quick search of Twitter reveals, Dunning-Kruger is invoked nearly every day by people arguing against each others intelligence. (Sample dialogue from October: Said like a true deluded simpleton Dunning-Kruger! You are the one suffering Dunning-Kruger!) A usage that Dunning finds unfortunate, and ironic, as it indicates a misunderstanding of the effect. We werent talking about them out there being incompetent. We were talking about how each of us is incompetent, he said. Dunning-Kruger should cause people to reflect on themselves, not to throw epithets at others.
In hindsight, this kind self-reflection may have been useful in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election, when mentions of Dunning-Kruger on social media reached a new high. In the beginning, many of them were in reference to the candidate Donald Trump, whose combination of over the top blustering (My IQ is one of the highest, he has claimed) and obvious ignorance in areas such as foreign policy struck many Twitters users as, the personification of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Dunning himself didnt disagree. During the campaign, Trump made a number of statements that didnt seem well-considered, he says, citing Trumps unconstitutional Muslim ban, his apparent unfamiliarity with the nuclear triad, and the time he suggested United States creditors take a haircut on Treasury bonds without seeming to understand the role of said bonds in the world economy. It seemed, especially in contrast with Hillary Clinton, that this was one of the least prepared candidates in my lifetime, but also the most confident candidate. It seemed like the most public example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, or something that looked like the Dunning-Kruger effect, that Id ever seen.
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Donald Trump, the Dunning-Kruger President (Original Post)
babylonsister
Jan 2017
OP
a way to combat this in normal people is to ask them to explain details about thier position
uponit7771
Jan 2017
#5
WheelWalker
(8,955 posts)1. No question about it. A classic example.
gordianot
(15,240 posts)2. A dibilitating condition for which there is no cure and ends with failure.
Mirrors and facts do not work for these people.
longship
(40,416 posts)3. Mirrors are useless to vampires. Everybody knows that. nt
muriel_volestrangler
(101,321 posts)4. Great writing by the article author, too:
I cant imagine anybody walking into the Oval Office and it not being the Dunning-Kruger effect. The job has so many complex dimensions, theres economic and social and foreign policies, I dont know how anybody thinks they could program their range to do all of it. But thats why you hire good people, I guess.
There was a sad pause in our conversation.
There was a sad pause in our conversation.
I guess the D-K effect extends to the ability to put together a competent team, as well.
uponit7771
(90,347 posts)5. a way to combat this in normal people is to ask them to explain details about thier position