Thank you, Hot2Na, for bringing up the Dunning-Kruger effect in a reply to one of my comments about how stupid the “Liberate Michigan,” etc. protesters are. I looked up “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” and it was so interesting, I’m making it its own diary.
Basically, as Hot2Na (and Wikipedia) note:
In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.[1]
As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the bias results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "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."[1]
Thanks to this cognitive bias, some people fail to recognize their own incompetence (i.e., stupidity). Case in point is would-be bank robber McArthur Wheeler, who (having learned of the “invisible ink” property of lemon juice) thought that if he coated his face in lemon juice, he would be invisible to bank security cameras. And so, he rubbed lemon juice all over his face and robbed two consecutive banks on the same day (April 19, 1999). When the security camera footage was shown on TV, Wheeler got caught. “But I wore the juice,” Wheeler said, when the police arrested him. He was unable to understand how he could have been identified.
The Dunning-Kruger effect probably explains why we Dems can argue the facts and the logic and the science to the Trump supporters, until we turn blue in the face (the subject of a number of Kos diaries and some of my own rants), and the Cult of Trump cannot be swayed. They lack the metacognitive ability to “objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.” They are unable to doubt their own misperceptions.
McArthur Wheeler was a textbook case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
So is Trump.
So are far too many of Trump’s supporters.