The Dunning-Kruger Effect

There exists a phenomenon I have observed for years but I never knew it had a name. It is the Dunning-Kruger effect.

There is an anti-science climate growing in this country. There are anti-vaxers who believe vaccinations are evil. There are climate-change deniers who believe that the thousands of climate scientists around the world have conspired to pull off a huge hoax. There is the anti-GMO food movement that has decided GMO foods are dangerous despite the many studies that have shown they are not. This anti-science climate extends all the way down to the ridiculous, such as flat-earth believers.

Why do so many people refuse to accept reality and logic? This is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes in. According to Wikipedia,

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority comes from the inability of low-ability people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

As Dunning stated: "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."

Of course, the anti-science crowd would be the first to deny that there is even a thing like the Dunning-Kruger effect or, if there is, that it would ever apply to them. Their motto appears to be: “Don’t confuse me with facts … my mind is made up!” Like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand, they want to deny reality and substitute their own reality. This is not good. The solution is better science education in public schools. Perhaps we should throw in a few courses in Logic as well, as so many people seem unable to use logic.

I don’t know where this reality-denial phenomenon will take our country. But I know this: denying reality can never lead to a good outcome.