I’ve written about Dunning-Kruger Effect before, but some things bear repeating.
The first part of the Dunning-Kruger effect found that, in a nutshell, dumb people will always think they are smart because they are too dumb to know how much they DO NOT know. Smart people will always understand that they aren’t that smart, because they are smart enough to know there is SO MUCH to learn.
The worst part about the fact that dumb people don’t know they’re dumb is that they are impervious to facts. A fact they don’t understand or cannot comprehend bounces off them like a bullet off a Superman. Their stupidity cannot be dented by mere education.
Which brings us to racists.
Studies have show that while not all stupid people are racists, almost all racists are stupid people. That means to racists, their prejudice and hate should be the ‘obvious’ way people should think because racists are too stupid to know how stupid their beliefs are. That’s why the dipshits double-down on racism. To them, the non-racists are the ones who cannot comprehend reality. Racists are too stupid to understand the stupidity of racism and their own cognitive inability.
Missouri woman hails KKK, wraps herself in confederate flag, while protected by the police from r/PublicFreakout
This is, of course, different from systemic racism. That’s the racism people don’t see. Moreover, if someone is smart enough to see how dumb open racism is, when they know that you don’t have to be white to be a scientist or doctor, they think they are too smart to be unconsciously biased or to benefit from a racist system. Sadly, this isn’t true. No one, not even people like Einstein and Hawking and Curie, can be smart enough not to have culturally ingrained ethnocentrism.
Which brings us to the second part of the Dunning-Kruger effect — a person who is smart and hella good in one field often erroneously believes he or she is thus knowledgeable about everything. They don’t understand there are things you don’t know or understand, even if your IQ is through the roof. A rocket scientist does not axiomatically know diddly about the economy or how to teach kindergarteners. Personally, I’ve noticed people in the STEM fields — doctors, engineers, etc — are very vulnerable to this. It can be hard for them to grasp that they are not experts in everything just because they are really intelligent. It can be hard to get a person with an MIT degree and 160 IQ to understand that he or she doesn’t understand something outside his or her field. This is especially true if the thing they don’t understand is in a subject they think any idiot could learn, like one of the arts or humanities.
An excellent example of this is Ben Carson. He’s brain surgeon. He’s undeniably smart. However, he thinks his MD degree and high IQ qualifies him to understand complex subjects, like housing, better than others who have spend a decade studying the topic.
Frankly, I think the Dunning-Kruger effect is the explanation for the Backfire Effect. The backfire effect is the phenomenon wherein facts not only do not change someone’s mind; the facts actually make people more determined to support their incorrect opinion/belief.
A near perfect example of backfire effect is this voter who claimed that Trump would have to “commit adultery on his beautiful, classy wife” to lose her support, then dismissed his affair with Stormy Daniels because it “was years ago before he ever became president. Nobody is accountable for what he done when he was a lot younger.” (Trump was 60 at the time of the affair, BTW.)
While it is easy to mock the woman for denying reality, it is important to remember that no one is immune to backfire effect. Not you, and not me. There is always something so important to us that we’ll dance around facts or look for even the flimsiest ‘evidence’ that the facts we don’t like are incorrect. Only the reasoning behind the backfire varies. If you are really dumb, like a racist, facts don’t matter because you can’t understand them and don’t want to believe them. If you are really smart, facts don’t matter because you don’t want to believe them even if you can grasp the raw information of the fact itself.
To be honest, I cannot tell which drives me more crazy — smart people denying facts, or dumb people denying facts. It hurts to watch a smart person do it, because it is counter-intuitive that a brilliant mind can force itself to be ignorant. On the other hand, backfire effect in stupid people is extra annoying because they are so often smug about it. If they don’t know something or haven’t learned something, then to them that thing must not exist.
It’s exhausting, yet I’m still running around social media with my facts as if those facts will make a dent in the opinions of people condemning Black Lives Matter and insisting ‘white privilege’ is a ‘slur’ or insisting trans women are somehow a threat to cis women. Why do I bother?
Clearly, I am insane.
totally co-signing this. X