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babylonsister

(171,070 posts)
Mon Jan 9, 2017, 10:28 PM Jan 2017

Donald Trump, the Dunning-Kruger President

http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/why-donald-trump-will-be-the-dunning-kruger-president.html?mid=fb-share-scienceofus

Donald Trump, the Dunning-Kruger President
By Jessica Pressler


Ever since Donald J. Trump was elected president, David Dunning’s 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 One’s 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 don’t know what they don’t 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 internet’s 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 other’s 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 weren’t 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 didn’t disagree. “During the campaign, Trump made a number of statements that didn’t seem well-considered,” he says, citing Trump’s 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 I’d ever seen.”



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http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/why-donald-trump-will-be-the-dunning-kruger-president.html?mid=fb-share-scienceofus
5 replies = new reply since forum marked as read
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Donald Trump, the Dunning-Kruger President (Original Post) babylonsister Jan 2017 OP
No question about it. A classic example. WheelWalker Jan 2017 #1
A dibilitating condition for which there is no cure and ends with failure. gordianot Jan 2017 #2
Mirrors are useless to vampires. Everybody knows that. nt longship Jan 2017 #3
Great writing by the article author, too: muriel_volestrangler Jan 2017 #4
a way to combat this in normal people is to ask them to explain details about thier position uponit7771 Jan 2017 #5

gordianot

(15,240 posts)
2. A dibilitating condition for which there is no cure and ends with failure.
Mon Jan 9, 2017, 10:56 PM
Jan 2017

Mirrors and facts do not work for these people.

muriel_volestrangler

(101,321 posts)
4. Great writing by the article author, too:
Tue Jan 10, 2017, 06:42 AM
Jan 2017
“I can’t imagine anybody walking into the Oval Office and it not being the Dunning-Kruger effect. The job has so many complex dimensions, there’s economic and social and foreign policies, I don’t know how anybody thinks they could program their range to do all of it. But that’s why you hire good people, I guess.”

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.
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