So there’s this thing called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who don’t know much about a given topic are the ones most confident that they do. (Yeah, most of us figured this out on our own back in middle school, but whatever. Social psychologists gotta eat too, you know.)
Where it really gets interesting, though, is in the realm of politics. Here’s Ian Anson, assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County:
Many Americans appear to be extremely overconfident in their political knowledgeability, because they have no way of knowing how little they actually know about the world of politics (this is the so-called “double bind of incompetence”). But there’s a catch: when Republicans and Democrats engage in partisan thought processes, this effect becomes even stronger than before.
“I think,” continues Anson, in what ought to be in the running for understatement of the decade, “this has major implications for the breakdowns in political discourse we often observe in contemporary American democracy.”
So, basically, each side thinks the other side is stupid. Sounds about right.
by Susanna