Anyone with more than a passing interest in psychology has surely heard, by now, of the Dunning-Kruger effect – the cognitive bias whereby incompetent people are so incompetent they don’t realise how incompetent they are. (The classic case involved a bank robber who was stunned to be caught; he’d assumed that smearing his face with lemon juice would render him invisible to security cameras.) This is overconfidence of an especially scary kind, because it’s not just a case of talented people exaggerating their talents, but of the untalented feeling disproportionately talented – because they’re untalented. The phenomenon is presumably as old as humanity, but recently, watching and reading the news on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s hard to shake the sense that we’re crossing some kind of threshold. Historians of the future may refer to ours as the Dunning-Kruger era.
The most obvious case, it goes without saying, is that of the proto-fascist misogynist who’s running (at the time of writing, anyway) for president of the United States. It’s not simply that he wouldn’t know how to govern, but that he doesn’t know he wouldn’t know. The British politicians so breezily confident they could handle the results of a Brexit referendum – from Cameron to Gove and Johnson to May – would also seem to fit the bill. But the greatest hazard, with Dunning-Kruger, is imagining it can’t apply to you. (That’s kind of the point of it, after all.) So all of us who thought Brexit or Donald Trump’s nomination impossible must likewise ask ourselves: were we so ill-informed about the world outside our bubbles that this actually boosted our confidence in our judgments?
One reason Dunning-Kruger seems to be everywhere these days, its co-creator David Dunning argued recently, is the echo-chamber effect of modern media: people aren’t merely uninformed, but actively misinformed, “their heads filled with false data, facts and theories that can lead to misguided conclusions held with tenacious confidence and extreme partisanship”. As for our bullish political leaders, a more alarming thought occurs. What if the modern world is so complex, so unpredictable, that the only politicians who can project the required confidence are, almost by definition, deluding themselves? The author Sam Harris recently said he’d prefer that the presidency went to an American picked at random rather than Trump. It’s hard to disagree: at least the random American would likely be terrified by the realisation that he or she was hopelessly ill-equipped, and would therefore defer to the experts.
It can be liberating, as I’ve written before, to know that everyone is winging it, all the time; otherwise we assume we’re the only ones experiencing self-doubt. But there’s a vast difference between the people who realise they’re winging it and those who don’t. Politicians are frequently accused of acting like children. But let’s be more specific. The politicians of our Dunning-Kruger era act like that stereotype about teenagers (which is probably unfair to most teenagers): entirely certain they know everything, precisely because they don’t.
oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
