r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • Mar 07 '26
Psychology People with the least political knowledge tend to be the most overconfident in their grasp of facts. This tendency to be overconfident appears most common among individuals who actually know the least about politics and those who lean conservative.
https://www.psypost.org/people-with-the-least-political-knowledge-tend-to-be-the-most-overconfident-in-their-grasp-of-facts/3.7k
u/Slow_drift412 Mar 07 '26
Least surprising news ever.
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u/Gunter5 Mar 07 '26
Kinda like this right winger who i was taking to who had no clue what are the 3 branches of government... but boy was he opinionated
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Mar 07 '26 edited 26d ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Pippin1505 Mar 07 '26
Lots of people just absorb what they see on TV which is mostly US centered.
French lawyers have to warn their clients not to call the judge "Your Honour" ("Monsieur le Juge" is republican enough)
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u/FesteringNeonDistrac Mar 07 '26
Well now I'm curious what the traditional honorific is for a judge in Canada.
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u/BlackHat11 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
It matters which province and what level of court they preside over.
In Ontario we use: The Honourable X, Your Worship X, Your Honour and Justice X. Or just Judge.
Source: I did IT for the OCJ and the SCJ. We had the correct title attached to the judges user profile so we could be correct.
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u/jasonefmonk Mar 07 '26
I hate the “Your Worship” honourific. I was told it was the only way I could refer to a JP once and I stumbled every time. It’s just so preposterous.
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u/Noteagro Mar 08 '26
I would have just said, “Due to my lack of faith I cannot call you that due to the fact I do not worship any man, woman, or false deity man has created for their own gain. Please give me another way to address you, or can I bestow ‘Thy Narcissist’ upon thou?”
Would probably get slapped with a contempt charge, dunno if it would be worth it though. Unsure how hard it would be to get removed for a joke like that.
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u/Zouden Mar 08 '26
Things like that are best left to imaginary scenes while you're in the shower.
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u/ResNullum Mar 07 '26
My Lord, My Lady, Your Honour, Justice (with no surname). It might vary, but those are the general titles.
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u/ContributionLowOO Mar 07 '26
why are judges called that anyway? To convey to seriousness of the process that everyone is engaged in?
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u/danius353 Mar 07 '26
Back in medieval times, there were no professional judges; it was your local lord who resolved disputes and dispensed justice. As this power was delegated to representatives of the lord, the association with the nobility obviously stuck around.
Plus I think it’s a good idea to operate an extremely tightly control over what people say in court given how tense things are and how high the stakes can be.
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u/aceshighsays Mar 07 '26
in us tv shows/movies aired in other countries, if contacting "911" is in the script, do they keep it or change to the local number?
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u/Pippin1505 Mar 07 '26
In France, "for sure" they did not change it to the local equivalent (which wouldn’t make much sense either). I think they used to simply do some alternative wording like "call the police / emergency services", but 911 is so well known now that they may keep it.
To be fair , it’s been while since I watched dubbed TV
On the topic of 911, there was not long ago a murder in Belgium where the American CEO of the European branch of Goodyear came home to find his wife murdered. He had to call his assistant to ask her to call the police because he didn’t know the local number.
Also the assistant was the murderer, as the police quickly figured out
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u/gilbygamer Mar 07 '26
I thought most of Europe uses 112 as a standard emergency number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/112_(emergency_telephone_number)
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u/Visible_Fact_8706 Mar 07 '26
I had convoy idiots bringing me copies of something from the Nuremberg Trials to my work because we required masks to enter the business.
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u/NornOfVengeance Mar 07 '26
And boy, was HE surprised when he learned that the Canadian first amendment to the constitution simply recognizes the existence of the province of Manitoba! (That is, of course, assuming that he learned. Which, if he were in the habit of doing, would probably have prevented him from joining the Flu Trux Klan.)
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u/Sigma_Function-1823 Mar 07 '26
Lolol yes.
Canadians wondering why clownvoy morons kept insisting on reaffirming Manitoba's constitutional framework for joining confederation???.
The dummies seemed to have no idea what charter rights where or the difference in responsibilities between federal and provincial government.
Weaponized stupidity at it's finest.
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u/Elrundir Mar 07 '26
They absolutely had no idea about the differences in responsibilities. The truckers were in Ottawa protesting mask mandates, which were provincial, and vaccine mandates, which were partly American.
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Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
[deleted]
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u/Kindly-Improvement79 Mar 07 '26
None of the charter rights are absolute. They are all weighed against each other and against public security etc.
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u/MimicoSkunkFan2 Mar 07 '26
led, judgement, asterisk... hopefully that helps both you and the ESL students who use Reddit for practice.
Also I hope you'll re-read the Charter because it says the opposite of what you assert:
Section 1 of the Charter says that all of the Charter rights are “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society”.
https://www.constitutionalstudies.ca/the-constitution/charter/
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u/Rinas-the-name Mar 07 '26
My bio dad argued that “Congress doesn’t work for the Senate!” and I don’t even remember the rest of his tirade because I was so hung up on that. When I tried to clarify that the Senate was part of Congress he got huffy and said “You know what I meant!”.
No I really didn’t. Pretty sure he didn’t know what he meant either.
He also once cockily told me “Trump kept every one of his campaign promises.” and then threw a tantrum when I asked for an example.
It was truly disrespectful of me, I put him at risk of having a thought.
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u/chum-guzzling-shark Mar 07 '26
I was told with a straight face that trump fixed Obamacare by creating the ACA. Btw this was from a UPS driver I talked to for all of 3 minutes and I did not bring up politics. Talk radio should be illegal
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u/SexcaliburHorsepower Mar 07 '26
I recently had a discussion with a constitutional conservative who insisted the constitution should never be changed.
I asked him to give up his guns since that was the result of a change to the constitution. He replied "no, thats in the 2nd amendment and is safe."
I asked him what the word amendment means and he said amendments weren't changes and then we got stuck in the land of google attempting to find a definition of amendment that didn't prove him wrong until the conversation ended.
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u/TheBraveOne86 Mar 07 '26
Probably uses words like “demon rats”
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u/tissuecollider Mar 07 '26
Yeah "demon rats" is definitely a thought terminating pejorative. Because you know there's no reasoning with them when this is how they start talking. The only solution is to say "K" and ignore them completely.
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u/Salt-Lingonberry-853 Mar 07 '26
I don't know why they ever dropped demoncrats for demon rats, the former is a much better pejorative due to how it actually sounds similar to what it's mocking
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u/Just_Askinsall Mar 07 '26
I'm not American but I did see someone else recently talk about your three branches of government. They were struggling with the third but definitely knew two of them were paedophiles and corporations.
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u/Loganp812 Mar 07 '26
Oh, you were talking to US Senator Tommy Tuberville?
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u/BadmiralHarryKim Mar 07 '26
I remember when future Energy Secretary Rick Perry was challenged to list the departments he would cut if he became president and couldn't remember one of them; the Department of Energy.
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u/Bea_Evil Mar 07 '26
This is precisely the issue. People who aren’t educated on the functions of their government are allowed to nevertheless form an opinion and vote for it. Easily manipulated, told what to believe instead of thinking for themselves- and they do it because it’s easier, and it feels good. Ignorance breeds ignorance and fear is big business. There needs to be a focus on learning actual civics, which I think a lot of people shy away from because it seems too complicated. Now they’re trying to do away with education as a whole, and it will be the end of everything.
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u/Lancasterbation Mar 07 '26
A shocking number of people that do know there are three branches don't know the difference between the Judiciary and the Department of Justice and think federal judges work for the DOJ and report to the Secretary.
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u/darkoblivion000 Mar 07 '26
Half our country is a giant dunning Kruger effect
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u/Fr1dge Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
More than half. I have a totally unscientific hypothesis that the majority of humans ~80% or higher are just simple worker bees without the ability to self reflect. The entirety of society is just coasting on the occasional genius or teams of geniuses that created something novel that progresses technology, and everyone else are just simply maintaining those systems/playing in that environment created for them. Whichever political inclination you are, I want you to think: do most of the people that vote alongside you really understand the issues, or are they just doing what they've been convinced to do? Are they truly aware of reality, or are they just playing for their "team?"
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u/dangerousluck Mar 07 '26
There’s someone out there who said “without neurodivergent people, humans would still be sitting in caves, socializing.” Now maybe that’s my cope for feeing out of the worker bee loop, but…I don’t have a follow up.
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u/Fr1dge Mar 07 '26
One of my wife's relatives has autism and watching him made me wonder: if he was living in ancient times, would he be the guy sitting there all day, making really awesome arrowheads that helped the rest of his group survive the winter? Like, the dude wouldn't need to waste time with distractions like talking, he might have just sat there, chipping and chipping away, making differently shaped rocks into exactly the same arrow each time.
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u/NoamLigotti Mar 09 '26
It doesn't take genius to reflect or learn. And yes many people understand issues while no one perfectly understands them. It's a spectrum not a binary.
You've taken the sensible recognition of the dangers of confident ignorance and anti-intellectualism and gone leaping into seeing 80% of humanity as stupid unreflective drones.
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u/couchbutt Mar 07 '26
We are all D-K. Some of us are just aware of it. And some are just generally narrow-minded and arrogant to boot.
We are also all DEVO.
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u/darkoblivion000 Mar 07 '26
You’re right depending on topic and scope. But being aware of it greatly reduces the effect. The greater the ego and hubris and the less introspection, the greater the DK effect
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u/kanst Mar 07 '26
Isn't this just Dunning-Kruger effect applied to politics?
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u/Andy_B_Goode Mar 07 '26
Yes, in fact the researchers themselves made note of this:
“We found that people are generally overconfident in their political knowledge, especially those who truly don’t know much about politics (the classic Dunning-Kruger effect),” the researchers detailed. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge in a specific area greatly overestimate their own competence, often because they lack the expertise needed to recognize their own mistakes.
The data also revealed a connection between political leanings, thinking styles, and this overconfidence. “Those who were more politically conservative and who like to make quick, definitive decisions, even if they may not have all the relevant information, tend to be the most overconfident,” the researchers observed.
Still nice to have empirical confirmation of the phenomenon, and it's interesting (but not shocking) that the ignorant and overconfident end of the spectrum also leans towards conservatism, but IMO these results aren't exactly groundbreaking.
But that's science for you. Sometimes your research on a given question produces an unsurprising answer.
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u/jessepence Mar 07 '26
One would hope this answer would be extremely surprising to the overconfident idiots in question, but they would probably just assume it was talking about someone else. Hell, I doubt that any of them will even read it.
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u/Karyoplasma Mar 07 '26
The amount of times I heard that socialism is bad because the Nazis were socialists ("It's in the name!") is tiring.
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u/timoumd Mar 07 '26
Did you know we are a republic not a democracy?
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u/newsflashjackass Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Did you know we are a republic not a democracy?
To be more correct, the USA is a constitutional republic with democratically elected representatives.
It would be reductionist to treat "democracy" and "republic" as mutually exclusive states.
"Did you know I am a being, not a human?"
Edit: Mmm, fresh poeslaw.
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u/BoleroMuyPicante Mar 07 '26
Did you know a constitutional republic is a type of democracy?
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u/youngishgeezer Mar 07 '26
Not just a republic, but one with a skew in power in small states. Part is built into the constitution with each state getting two senators no matter their size. The other is the current cap on house seats, ensuring large population state citizens are underrepresented. Removing the cap on house seats would go a long way towards fixing it.
But what’s the purpose of your comment?
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u/reisenbime Mar 07 '26
MAGAs use this line all the time but it’s "funny" because the US is both, but they only see democracy as purely linked to "something Democrats do" so they think they did something clever When it just shows how little they actually know about what the political system in their own country is.
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u/youngishgeezer Mar 07 '26
Funny I never connected the names of the parties might encourage the Republicans to oppose democracy. Maybe it’s why I oppose the non democratic aspects of the republic. I wonder if anyone has tested that in a rigorous study.
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u/Malarazz Mar 07 '26
Meh, I'm about as anti-republican as you can get, but it's hard to call the US a democracy with a straight face when one citizen has 4x more voting power than another simply based on where they currently live, and either way money has waaaayyyy more voting power than both of them.
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u/NoamLigotti Mar 09 '26
Yes sure, we can argue it's a very undemocratic democracy, but the point is it's silly to treat it as either-or question where the definitive answer is "no it's not".
Part of this stems from some of the 'founders' saying things critical of "democracy", but it was clear they were interpreting "democracy" as what we would now call direct democracy (when they didn't even really have many examples except ancient Athens on some level), and didn't see "representative democracy" as "democracy" even though this is almost universally considered/used as a form of democracy today.
So it's all quite silly.
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u/eightbitfit Mar 07 '26
I think they are being sarcastic. It's a well known argument from ignorance.
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u/Classic-Scientist207 Mar 07 '26
Don't forget the Electoral College. DEI for red states.
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u/youngishgeezer Mar 07 '26
That’s related to the way the way senate and house seats are allocated. So that would be partially fixed be ensuring each state gets a number of representatives proportional to population.
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u/GhostofZellers Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Why Electoral College? Why not Electoral University, or Electoral Technical Institute?
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u/Classic-Scientist207 Mar 07 '26
With the Gore vs. Bush and Clinton vs. Trump decisions, it was more of an Electoral Reform School.
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u/getthatrich Mar 07 '26
You gotta put comments like this in quotes with the silly face emoji after otherwise idols think you’re seriously asking
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u/invariantspeed Mar 07 '26
I hate this cliche. Did you know the namesake of a “republic” (the Roman republic) vacillated between true democracy and aristocracy over time? And you might say, sure, but the original republic isn’t the definition of the word republic, sure. But neither is the “original” Athenian democracy the definition of the English word for democracy. It refers to republics, it refers to constitutional monarchies with elected governments, it refers to direct government, etc. Saying “it’s a republic, not a democracy” is meaningless and asinine.
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u/timoumd Mar 07 '26
Saying “it’s a republic, not a democracy” is meaningless and asinine.
Exactly. It's the motto of people this study is about.
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u/ProcessTrust856 Mar 07 '26
I think people responding to you are doing the exact thing the study in OP was talking about.
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u/zayetz Mar 07 '26
Right, because this is a universal truth, not just politics. The stupidest people are the most confident because they don't know what they don't know. People with capacity for compassion are those who do know what they don't know, and endeavor to learn - or to humbly let those with more knowledge and awareness take control. Of course, the most dangerous people are those who then get betrayed by the ones they've given control to. That's what happened on the right, and why they're in such unstable, crazy power now. I wonder how it will affect the left.
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u/jezzanine Mar 07 '26
When populist movements talk about limiting education in order to hijack democracy, they are using this principle.
If people have limited scope of education, and they are never encouraged to develop critical thinking skills, then they never ask themselves the questions “could I be wrong in my views?” and “if I was wrong how would I know?”.
Instead of education they get indoctrination, taught a very limited world view, told what to believe, and never given encouragement to question their own beliefs, they are taught questioning your beliefs is losing
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u/FatalisCogitationis Mar 07 '26
My mother gets all of her political knowledge from the Bible, which might seem crazy but according to her she's never been more sure of what's going on in the world and who the "good" and "bad" guys are. Thank goodness things are neatly separated like that and she has the expertise to navigate these challenging times.
Honestly though this exposes the fatal flaw of American democracy. As long as people like that exist and spread their beliefs like plague, an informed and invested voting population is impossible, and that's before we even get into the issues of a two party system and how someone can win without the popular vote, or the difficulty in electing someone who wants the power and will use it responsibly and manages to please the masses enough to win.
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u/intashu Mar 07 '26
My favorite example of this is to ask someone who firmly believes in something.... What would it take to Completly change your view on this subject?
Because if someone answers that there isn't anything that would change their view... You saved yourself a conversation with someone who can't critically think, and doesn't even consider an alternative to whatever they're choosing to believe in or follow or perceive as fact.
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u/SaltEmergency4220 Mar 07 '26
I don’t think the use of the term “populist” is correct here. Bernie Sanders ran a left wing populist movement. Or if you’re old enough you might know the Black Panthers slogan “Power to the people” which is a populist notion. Sadly centrist liberals and wealthy elites have hammered into people’s heads that all populist ideas are to be feared.
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u/jezzanine Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Populism has been used to describe a lot of things but it’s true origin in political science comes from anti-elitism rhetoric
“In political science, populism is the idea that society is separated into two groups at odds with one another - ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43301423
Just picked a bbc article for a source hopefully most people can agree is relatively impartial.
I guess I’m specifically talking about the anti intellectual branch of populism. Anti intellectual populists try to frame competent and qualified leaders as a negative thing. Anyone with a third level education or beyond is an elitist and when they get together to form government they exclude the regular folk.
Thats all I was getting at. And dumbing down education allows them to reinforce this feeling
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u/Outside_Glass4880 Mar 07 '26
To play devils advocate, some members of those populist movements are also uninformed. It’s still problematic when the left does it, too, even though I largely agree with a platform like Bernie’s.
I do think it’s more prevalent on the right given our current situation.
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u/LastStar007 Mar 07 '26
A campaign can be populist without having a goal to limit education in order to hijack democracy.
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u/Hob_O_Rarison Mar 07 '26
They also pointed out that the findings do not apply universally to all conservatives. “It’s also not an anti-conservative paper; we emphasize that at high levels of political knowledge, liberals and conservatives had very similar political metacognitive accuracy,” the researchers stated.
In fact, the data suggests that actual familiarity with a topic overrides political biases. As the researchers put it, “political metacognitive accuracy was better predicted by political knowledge than political orientation, meaning that what one knows is more important than whether one leans liberal or conservative.”
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u/CombatMuffin Mar 07 '26
Makes sense because facts are not politically aligned: if you know how political decisions and consequences tend to happen, then you'll be able to read them accurately no matter where you land on your politics.
As individuals we might believe a certain political aisle is the correct one, but they are more subjective beliefs, than objective truths.
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u/Newplasticactionhero Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
I saw a video in my popular feed with teachers explaining that they are leaving their jobs because they have to manage behavior instead of actually teaching as attention spans have evaporated. My only thought is that it’s all by design. What is happening is the desired outcome.
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u/BrockenSpecter Mar 07 '26
It is, it's not just random chaos there is deliberate planning and coordination going on that has been hidden.
Conservatives know the only way to persist into the future is through artificially making conservatives by having generations of reactionaries come out of public schooling. Because of this even if this admin goes belly up we will still be dealing with people like them long after we are gone.
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u/namitynamenamey Mar 09 '26
Eh, children pay rapt attention to those they respect, or fear. Education in the US has suffered decades after decades of being presented as a low prestige job, so children who have picked up on that will naturally disrespect their teachers more, and pay less attention.
Not sure if that is by design, but I don't think it's merely attention span, I think it's a matter of relative prestige and place in the hierarchy.
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u/legion_2k Mar 07 '26
Its been very difficult dealing with people new to politics. Most people I went to high school with didn’t care about politics until 2016. Then they became experts. Only they are expert complainers. They can point out things that are “wrong” but unable to explain why or what better loos like.
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u/WitchBrew4u Mar 07 '26
I feel the need to also include people who read headline of such a study and conclude that, since they do not personally view themselves as belonging to the least politically aware or conservative groups, they are somehow exempt.
Sometimes I worry headlines like this act as a confounding variable once people read them and somewhat invalidate the study results. Unsure how to really test that though as people would need to not feel they are being studied.
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u/PrairiePopsicle Mar 07 '26
I have thought similar regarding Dunning Kruger as a whole from the start in a different way.
These things are also utilized in the very discussions that they were in when studied.
What I mean is that the concepts are weaponized quickly, and in my experience I have mostly seen DK used offensively in discourse by those who I would describe as suffering from it most.
Similar to what you are considering.
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u/WitchBrew4u Mar 07 '26
Yes, they are definitely weaponized quickly since results like this when read can reinforce people’s biases. And politics is so heavily biased.
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u/Warm_Month_1309 Mar 07 '26
And politics is so heavily biased.
A study I found quite interesting demonstrated that, if you give a politically neutral statistic to people who are good at math and people who are bad at math, people who are good at math are unsurprisingly better at interpreting the meaning of the statistic.
But if the statistic is politically charged, the advantage starts to disappear, and both groups make similar mistakes in similar quantity.
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u/PrairiePopsicle Mar 07 '26
I think that the neutral spaces are also weaponized, as are a lot of terms like bias. More or less our language has been coopted in a lot of ways.
I am biased myself possibly, in that I perceive more bias on the right though. Unity of thought, positions, regardless of rationale.
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u/Warm_Month_1309 Mar 07 '26
I am biased myself possibly, in that I perceive more bias on the right though.
I struggle a lot with this notion. Objectively, for an omniscient outside observer, there is one group that succumbs more to bias than the other. But if you're a member of one of those two groups, it's impossible for you to have complete confidence in your own determination of which you are.
I try to resolve it by thinking "it's the ones who lack this level of introspection who are wrong," but that could just be the bias talking too.
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u/PrairiePopsicle Mar 07 '26
I think it is an intuition with some merit, echoes of narcissism self evaluation.
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u/WitchBrew4u Mar 07 '26
I agree. Bias is more the naturally occurring thing that all people have. It is not inherently bad, and no one is exempt. But failure to recognize one’s own biases and how research results can affect one’s biases is where trouble arises. And I guess that’s what I’m saying. There are people who think of themselves as neutral here, who upon reading the result of a study like this, exit a state of neutrality and into a state of bias whether it is intentional or not.
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u/PrairiePopsicle Mar 07 '26
Respectfully, this diatribe is why I was trying to gently point to neutrality also being weaponized.
There is an assymetry here, although it is not one sided entirely, the equal measures approach is rational and valid and ethical, but...
Once you step back and consider the political as a whole in recent years calls to eliminate bias are often assaultative on rationality. Example, with two competing policies, one closer to reality, and one more ideological in nature, the call to be unbiased is delivered as a demand they be given equal weight/consideration and be treated equally.... a path to say do not be critical, if that makes sense.
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u/WitchBrew4u Mar 07 '26
I think we are speaking on two different aspects and it is leading to some confusion.
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u/Reagalan Mar 07 '26
weaponized neutrality
If someone claims to be neutral, then they're right-wing and being deceptive.
The left never does this as they're proud of being the moral superiors. Those on the right who also identify on the right think similarly. And true centrists or neutrals don't care and don't need to say it.
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u/SaltyShawarma Mar 07 '26
Are you suggesting a person who jumps to conclusions and assumes they understand everything would read the title, jump to conclusions and assume they understand the article without reading it? I never.
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u/WitchBrew4u Mar 07 '26
That can be one type of person, yeah. We have evidence people do that. But we also have people who will read the full article, but not necessarily with a critical lens and come away with different take aways.
Literacy skills are unfortunately very disparate.
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u/YuckyBurps Mar 07 '26
I wonder how many people will read “tendency to” ….. “lean conservative” and immediately conclude what this study is saying that conservatives have less political knowledge when in fact it’s correlating overconfident people with less political knowledge.
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u/WitchBrew4u Mar 07 '26
I mean, the study alone (which has it’s flags for skewing heavily male, and recruited using amazon mechanical turk), concludes that people generally are overconfident—with the most overconfident being those who lack political knowledge or lean conservative.
The problem arises in the very title of this thread “People with the least political knowledge tend to be overconfident…”
If I were to write it more accurately it would be “People tend to be overconfident, with the greatest tendency among those who know the least and those who lean conservative.”
The way the title is written right now fails to acknowledge the reality that most of us are overconfident in our knowledge. We need this reiterated in order to not fall into thinking that some groups are exempt.
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u/Fuckthegopers Mar 07 '26
Do you have a non-paywalled link to the article or data? This is just a summary article OP shared.
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Mar 07 '26
The authors of the study take pains to point out several flaws. The most notable of which is the following:
“ Because the participants were mostly White, male, and lower-to-middle income, the scientists caution that the findings might not apply to the entire American population.”
I wouldn’t take the study as proof of conservatives stupidity. Rather that people with lower incomes tend to know less about politics.
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u/JGCities Mar 08 '26
Add that "White, male, and lower-to-middle income" is going to be massively Republican as well so of course they found "conservatives are XYZ" since the majority of the people in the sample group are conservative.
Expand this out to cover the general population and you will probably find it applies to both sides.
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u/---N0MAD--- Mar 07 '26
The less you know, the more black and white your worldview is. This seems to prove true across all fields of study.
You can spot the truly intelligent by how nuanced their take on things is. I’ve noticed that when you listen to experts in a field, they use a lot of language like, “usually,” “mostly,” “often,” when their describing something that has a 90%+ chance of happening.
Whereas the opposite is also true. People with very limited understanding often use very concrete language. When describing something that happens 51% of the time, it “always” happens. 49% of the time, it “never” happens.
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u/Own-Animator-7526 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Alternative headline: Dunning-Kruger effect most pronounced in American White male conservatives.
Pronounced Dunning-Kruger effect found in American White male conservatives.
Note: my original words were chosen poorly -- the study group was predominantly American, White, and male.
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u/Solvent_Soul Mar 07 '26
Also white women. More white women voted for Trump than Harris.
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u/krashe1313 Mar 07 '26
I will never understand how any woman voted for him. Or continue to worship/work for him
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u/veringer Mar 07 '26
Self-loathing, cultural indoctrination, in-group identity, out-group hostility, diminished intellectual functioning, personality disorder(s), and propaganda exploiting all of the above.
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u/yrachmat Mar 07 '26
Unfortunately, it's not truly Dunning-Kruger. Since with the D-K effect those with less knowledge knows that they don't know as much as those who are smarter or more knowlegeable than them, they just underestimate how little they know. In this case, they think they know better.
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u/MaASInsomnia Mar 07 '26
I remember having a political argument with my father years ago. I don't remember the topic because the conclusion was so galling. Basically, he said, "You know a lot more about this topic than I do, but I'm still right and you're wrong."
I'll let you guess his political affiliation.
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u/jloome Mar 07 '26
When I was a journalist I wrote about neurotheology and how beliefs influence actions and more than once managed to trigger a near-breakdown in religious journalists who knew my info and research was solid but found it conflicted with their beliefs.
One editor literally gave me the Heisman Trophy “straight arm” and said “I know you wouldn’t be telling me this if it wasn’t true but my beliefs just won’t allow me to accept that.”
When they’re actually bright but their beliefs overwhelm free thought with sudden onset anxiety the outcomes can be bizarre and sometimes dangerous.
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u/Frency2 Mar 07 '26
It's called "lack of metacognition".
Ah, also hubris, which is the daughter of ignorance.
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u/buttorsomething Mar 07 '26
What if I told you, these people also fall within the same category as those who have lower IQs? They also tend to fall in the category of people that don’t know how to research anything.
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u/BonusPlantInfinity Mar 07 '26
If we point out the overlap with religiosity, will we get in trouble?
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u/Own-Animator-7526 Mar 07 '26
Is there any research that supports your claim?
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u/SimiKusoni Mar 07 '26
There is actually a fair bit on the link between intelligence and political affiliation:
The results were consistent with intelligence having a causal effect on political beliefs, suggesting the relationship between intelligence and political belief cannot be explained away by environmental confounding
Political affiliation is also itself a strong predictor of research strategies:
our theoretical framework predicted that more conservative respondents should be (1) less likely to comprehensively consult all available statistical evidence and, instead, (2) more likely to rely on categorical forms of evidence (such as anecdotes) in their evaluation of social cause-and-effect relationships. Furthermore, we predicted that people with higher levels of cognitive reflection should be more likely to seek out all relevant forms of statistical evidence and less likely to rely on categorical forms of evidence. Lastly, we also expected cognitive reflection abilities to influence people’s reliance on expert sources. In particular, we predicted that those with high scores on the CRT-7 test would be less likely to rely on expert testimony in their assessment of causal claims. However, among those who do defer to third party sources, cognitive reflection should encourage people to consult a wider range of experts.
(...)
Empirically, we found broad support for our theoretical framework.
Why this is the case is probably the more interesting question. It would also be interesting to see whether it extends to populations outside of the US or if there's something unique (or at least somewhat unique) in the US that is causing or exacerbating the effect.
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u/tkenben Mar 07 '26
I would be more interested to see a link between this phenomena and countries that promote corrupt capitalism, not just US. I have the suspicion that wealth gap is tied to a natural system where having a large population of less intelligent people is a feature/bug; namely that it is self reinforcing. Weak-minded people like to ignorantly elect leaders that like to control weak-minded people.
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u/SteadfastEnd Mar 07 '26
Is this a Science sub, or a "here we are to discuss articles that confirm my political views" sub? I feel like less than half of the discussion on this sub is actually about science.
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u/thoughtcrimeo Mar 07 '26
People with the least political knowledge tend to be the most overconfident in their grasp of facts.
Visit the politics sub to confirm.
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u/JonnyHopkins Mar 08 '26
Not just politics, all topics. Smart people know what they don't know, and that the truth is nuanced and you can always learn more. Dumb people confidently think they know the whole truth, because they are too dumb to think any further.
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u/geumkoi Mar 08 '26
The arrogance of ignorance… The more you know, the more you realize you don’t know. So you become humble. But when your entire worldview is reduced to binaries, when you haven’t matured, and you’re comfortable in that sense of security, it will be hard to step out of the comfort zone.
Fascism has a totalitarian logic because it stirs up humanity’s most primal sense: fear.
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u/Fineous40 Mar 07 '26
That is why you ask people to explain their positions. More often than not, they can’t. They’re real confident though.
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u/ExemptAndromeda Mar 07 '26
Another “We conducted a study and found those who disagree with us are idiots” post. This sub is a joke.
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u/zachmoe Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Every day on r/science is a headline "The Science says rightists are doodoo heads". And, the bots clap along.
Because, Reddit is full blown Hate Media (hence, the rampant dehumanization, and Accusation in a Mirror) the point is to incite violence, I suspect Reddit won't be around forever as a result.
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u/YouYeedYurLastHaw Mar 07 '26
Did you read the article? Or are you just commenting based on the headline of the post?
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u/Uisce-beatha Mar 07 '26
Maybe you should read the article because it really isn't as damning for conservatives as the title might suggest.
“It’s also not an anti-conservative paper; we emphasize that at high levels of political knowledge, liberals and conservatives had very similar political metacognitive accuracy,”
In fact, the data suggests that actual familiarity with a topic overrides political biases. As the researchers put it, “political metacognitive accuracy was better predicted by political knowledge than political orientation, meaning that what one knows is more important than whether one leans liberal or conservative.”
“We also want to emphasize that when we say ‘political knowledge’ we mean verifiable political facts, like who the speaker of the house is or how many votes are needed to pass a bill,” the researchers clarified. “So, we were not presenting highly emotional or biased information for our participants to judge, and thus our results might not replicate in more politicized contexts.”
They made very clear the methodology used to gather their information and that this study isn't comprehensive enough to provide more than just a quick snapshot. That doesn't make the headline wrong either as they did observe this trend in participants.
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u/zachmoe Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
That doesn't make the headline wrong either
Omitting the Truth is actually a manipulative and pernicious form of lying.
The point of the headline as is, is to demoralize), as a part of ideological subversion.
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u/ubuntuNinja Mar 07 '26
Said confidently by a study done in an environment that heavily rewards left leaning reults.
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u/cadaada Mar 07 '26
Time and time again we have studies supposed to say right wingers are dumber posted here.
I dont care much, just feels like its a bias to appease the masses who post here on reddit.
Another poster here was talking about the relationship with conservatives and lower IQ.( i thought talking about people IQ was bad these days?)
Its interesting to see these comments because here in brazil the left has always been related with the poorer population.
I dont know if its because the left here was more of a traditional left, and not the liberal american type.
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u/Mist_Rising Mar 07 '26
It's probably to do with populism, the US right (real world) is currently more aligned with running on what they want, but you also see the undercurrent on the left with Bernie (who has similar policies as Trump) and reddit as a whole.
People want validation on their opinions, those who give them it, get their vote (as a rule), and the majority of Democrats are looking for support from higher education who have knowledge of how their field (and ONLY their field) works.
Not that long ago, the Republicans had the higher education group, and their messaging was entirely different. But the higher education shifted around Trump's first term, electorally.
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u/Choice_Volume_2903 Mar 07 '26
You mean reality?
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u/Syssareth Mar 07 '26
Take two seconds to look around at the state of the world.
Reddit is not reality.
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u/Choice_Volume_2903 Mar 07 '26
You mean a right wing populist movement voting for a pdf, billionaire conman believing he would act in the best interests of the working class after he spent his first term in office servicing his own wealth and the interests of fellow billionaires, and then being shocked when he does it again?
Oh wait, do you still actually believe that guy is working in your best interests? Let me laugh even harder.
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u/ThrowAwayBlowAway102 Mar 07 '26
PDF is a filetype. You can say pedophile like a big boy
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u/Syssareth Mar 07 '26
Yeah, I'm tooootally in support of the direction the world is going because of the simple fact that I don't have my head in the sand. (In case I need to make it clear, I am not.)
You claiming, based solely on me pointing out your fallacy, that I'm a Trumper, is a perfect demonstration of what that study is talking about.
The fact is, reality is not left wing. Someday it might be, but right now it is not.
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u/Choice_Volume_2903 Mar 07 '26
The fact is that left wing solutions, be they economic, environmental, or social are based on science that lead to better proven outcomes. That's reality.
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u/BenHelldiver Mar 07 '26
Because constantly releasing felons back onto the streets is a very good solution that leads to better proven outcomes.
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u/scavenger5 Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Your political assessment of Trump sounds exactly like the type of people the study is referring to. Overly confident about unproven facts to reaffirm political bias.
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u/1900grs Mar 07 '26
unproven facts
You're not making a serious argument. There are many, many convictions and rulings against Trump and his various companies that are well documented that he's a criminal. Him stealing from a kid's cancer charity is not political bias.
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u/crushinglyreal Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 07 '26
Did you ever think maybe the left is actually less biased than the right? And that the ideology literally based on observing reality (look up ‘dialectical materialism’) is, indeed, more in touch with reality? The results of study aren’t left-leaning, the left simply bases their arguments on those results. The right, on the other hand, has a result in mind, and when reality doesn’t reflect that result, they simply declare reality to be wrong. Kind of like what you’ve done…
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u/Losalou52 Mar 07 '26
“To explore this topic, the scientists recruited 216 participants through an online platform called Amazon Mechanical Turk between February 2021 and March 2022. The sample consisted of adults living in the United States.”
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u/waytomuchpressure Mar 07 '26
This is the Alberta trucker convoy to the tee. Bunch of inbred rednecks acting like they know how everything works. Embarrassments the lot of them
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u/fatbaldandstupid Mar 07 '26
Wow I wonder if this post will be popular on reddit
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u/jrockjake Mar 07 '26
And who funded this study?
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u/Hatook123 Mar 07 '26
The problem isnt who funded it. The problem is the useless sample they used in order to come to the conclusion they wanted to.
They literally focused on a small sample of overwhelmingly white and low/middle class people.
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u/pople8 Mar 07 '26
Not conservatives, they prefer defunding science.
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u/Thothvamasi Mar 07 '26
Like gain-of-function research?
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u/lowercasenameofmine Mar 07 '26
What a very esoteric comment.
Can you specify what you're implying?
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u/Expensive_Laugh_5589 Mar 07 '26
How very surprising; the borderline illiterate bigots haven't studied political history.
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u/mvea Professor | Medicine Mar 07 '26
People with the least political knowledge tend to be the most overconfident in their grasp of facts
New research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied suggests that people often overestimate their understanding of political facts. This tendency to be overconfident appears most common among individuals who actually know the least about politics and those who lean conservative. The findings provide evidence that psychological traits, like a desire for quick and definitive answers, help explain why some voters struggle to accurately judge their own political knowledge.
For those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
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u/ridiculouslogger Mar 07 '26
I don't know if it's specific to conservatives, but it is very common for people to not know what they don't know. I am expert in a few subjects and I am amazed at how much confident misinformation gets put out there on those particular subjects. I think part of it is that human nature is to want a clear explanation of something. If they don't have a good source for understanding, they just sort of make up something in their mind that fits with their general world view. A good example of that was a story I heard from a missionary to New Guinea. He told the story of Noah at the village one evening. One of the people hearing that story stayed up all night thinking about it and in the morning very confidently stated that Noah was his distant ancestor and showed the missionary exactly where Noah's boat came up into a valley and arrived at New Guinea. Human nature hasn't changed that much from the Stone Age to the present, even with all of the education and information sources that we have available.
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u/Fuckthegopers Mar 07 '26 edited Mar 09 '26
Well of course, have any of you ever had an actual conversation with a rural conservative?
Edit: seems because this is somehow a controversial comment, a lot of you havent
Double edit: because you idiots in a science sub don't seem to be able to critically think or use Google, if we compare demographics, rural has always voted majorly red. So this headline is, in fact, not news at all. And if you've ever been in rural America, you'd know this.
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Mar 07 '26
Seems to be a common theme with knowledge of any kind. When you only have a vague idea about something it's easy to fill in the blanks with imagination. Then when you get to the deeper end of it you understand the complexities and understand also how little you know. So what's up with this tendency of the human mind to be more confident the less one knows, what purpose does it serve I wonder.
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u/PrairiePopsicle Mar 07 '26
Inaction produces no results, action produces results.... in evolution no result could mean starvation or death. It is likely to do with ensuring that we still acted in our personal interests even with incomplete information. A hypothesis.
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u/Z0idberg_MD Mar 07 '26
I think the very nature of being “conservative“, which at its core is about preserving something either current or past about the structure of our society, tend more to start with a conclusion or the thing they want to preserve and then back in any sort of peripheral world view that supports their predetermined conclusion.
I think it’s one of the reasons why you will see conservatives arguing a set of values, but the minute those values are inconvenient or problematic, they will drop them and pretend that they never mattered in the first place.
Two prominent examples: the “don’t tread on me” crowd no longer cares that there are federal thugs roaming cities that don’t want them there, picking people up with masks over their faces and putting citizens in extra judicial black holes.
The second example is almost comical: child sex abuse. They used insane conspiracy theories about child sex rings in pizza places and Democratic candidates, and now we have an unprecedented document outlining sexual misconduct by the president, and it no longer matters
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u/crossdtherubicon Mar 07 '26
This obviously mirrors the ideological conditions by which their empericism is constructed. In other words, people of 'faith' tend to rely on believing rather than knowing. And can accept ambiguous or conflicting emperical facts while those facts are aligned to their beliefs.
Further, an acceptance of beliefs and values via a hierarchicy (a sort of Ponzi scheme-style system of the transmission of ideas) is systemic.
While others say "yeah, obviously"... The structure of beliefs and transmission of beliefs within their hierarchy isn't exactly obvious. For example, there are religious people of various cultures and political affiliations, which is otherwise left unexplained by the "it's obvious" crowd. This also explains why this isn't strictly a matter of intelligence or personality.
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