There's probably some underlying principle behind Dunning-Kruger. Stupid people can't tell they're stupid, irrational people can't tell they're irrational [1], and now we can add that over-confident people can't tell they're over-confident.
[1] Where this leaves people who start wondering what being rational is on the first place, I'm not sure. In a philosophy club, probably.
Via Andres Soolo, who asks the interesting question of whether over-confidence causes rigid thinking or whether it's the other way around.
One common feature of radicalism is a confidence in the rightness of your ideas, even if they go against those of society at large. So why do radicals have so much certainty? A new study pins the blame on a faulty metacognition, the process by which people recognize when their ideas might not be correct and update their beliefs accordingly. While the study didn't directly measure political radicalism, it did look at two traits that associate with it: dogmatism and authoritarianism.
The researchers decided to use a simple task with no obvious cultural implications: estimate how many dots were in an area after being only shown a brief glimpse of it and describe how confident they were in their estimate. In a second experiment, the participants were asked to make the same estimate as in the first experiment but were then given some additional information about the dot density of the image. This allowed them the opportunity to update their confidence level based on new information.
"Dogmatic people manifest a lowered capacity to discriminate between their correct and incorrect decisions," is how the researchers put it. This was also true for authoritarians. Critically, the lowered capacity wasn't the product of a general overconfidence, since that trait had been examined in some of the survey questions. And, informatively, people with radical beliefs were less likely to update their confidence in response to the additional information, a feature that the authors consider a defect specific to metacognition.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/12/radicals-dont-evaluate-their-mistakes-very-effectively/
People who are not stupid, rational, and not overly confident assume that the others care about those things. Obviously they don't. They are not trying to be correct, but only to express themselves (no matter how wrong they may be) and every attempt to challenge that is a challenge to their identity (they think).
ReplyDelete"The leaders we speak of are more frequently men of action than thinkers. They are not gifted with keen foresight, nor could they be, as this quality generally conduces to doubt and inactivity. They are especially recruited from the ranks of those morbidly nervous, excitable, half-deranged persons who are bordering on madness..."
ReplyDeleteGustave le Bon, Crowds, page 68
socialsciences.mcmaster.ca - socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/lebon/Crowds.pdf
While the study didn't directly measure political radicalism, it did look at two traits that associate with it: dogmatism and authoritarianism
ReplyDeletethose are three remarkably value-laden, manipulable terms. The description of the experiment shows something actually measurable being measured and I suspect the questionnaires are designed to dovetail with previous studies to generate coherent results but the setup of the article and the conclusion it tries to draw are suspect simply because of the language they use.
Richard G: No, both dogmatism and authoritarianism are terms of art in psychometric studies. In practical terms, you can imagine them as being defined "Here, take this well-known Likert scale questionnaire. Whatever it measures is called authoritarianism/dogmatism." For dogmatism, the DOG scale is the dominant one; for authoritarianism, the RWA scale is the dominant one. (Not coincidentally, both draw heavily from Bob Altemeyer's work.)
ReplyDeletencbi.nlm.nih.gov - Does the DOG scale measure dogmatism? Another look at construct validity. - PubMed - NCBI
Before the modern-day DOG, there used to be something called the Rokeach Dogmatism Scale. As far as I understand, it seems to be nowadays considered mostly obsolete, but may still be of historic interest on how scientists have researched dogmatism before.
ReplyDeleteSakari Maaranen: But perhaps it is irrational for a supposedly rational person to assume that other people are also rational. Has he got no Theory of Mind(tm) or what?
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo rationality is always limited. That is the correct assumption to make; obviously including the rationality making that assumption. Hence the precautionary principle.
ReplyDeleteAndres Soolo thanks for the clarification! Now I have some reading to do...
ReplyDelete