www.livescience.com/18706-people-smart-democracy.html/
This article states that people in this country are simply not smart enough to make political decisions wisely. We have all believed this was true, but now it is being scientifically proven! We assume that people can choose the best candidate for this country, but since most of the topics of debate are above people's heads (taxes) then how can they choose? Not only are people not understanding these topics, but they are even too ignorant to admit that they do not understand. Their studies also showed that people put their skills in a variety of areas as "above average."
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." --Bertrand Russell
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This is no surprise, in a way. At one level, it is another demonstration of the "Dunning-Kruger effect." (See my post on this from February 2011 in Obamadogs). Basically, this is a cognitive bias that operates among the least competent among us: after completing cognitive tasks or problem-solving performances, when those do chronicaly poorly are asked how they did relative to others, they tend to place themselves "above average" consistently. You see this all the time in politics where the criteria for poor performance are more ambiguous than the tests used by experimenters in the Dunning-Kruger studies. But it's more than ambiguity and ideology that make politics different. For one, media coverage is generally shoddy on the policy domains. People are remarkably uinformed about who pays what rates, for example. Do we blame those who get these rates totally wrong, or do we blame the press for failing to correct politicians who distort the truth? That said, journalists who do write articles on policy issues are seldom rewarded. Hardly anyone reads them. I use two small policy volumes in Intro -- one on taxes, the other on the Affordable Health Care Act. The truth about both policies are right there in black and white on the pages, and the basic fallacies in public opinion are noted in class. Yet for a significant portion of class members, the essays devoted to these volumes are full of the non-factual distortions that were supposed to be cleared up by the books. There are some truths that people are not too stupid to recognize; they're too psychically and politically invested in falsehoods to so deem them. Is that sheer stupidity? Or something quite different?
ReplyDeleteYour comment about the media is true. People do rely on the media to get all of their political information, and I am at fault myself. However, when I am not sure I understand what they are talking about I look it up. This is something I wish everyone would do but I think that is too much to ask. When I was in Vegas I went to a gift shop. I saw an older man who sounded like he was from the South. He asked where I was from and I replied Iowa. His face lit up and said "Oh! The first caucus state!" I was floored. All I could do was laugh a little and say that I was impressed that he knew that. He laughed as well and said "Well they are all just a bunch of crooks" and walked away. Even though what he may have said could be true in some cases, if he would inform himself of what it takes to get things done in politics perhaps he would not call them all crooks.
ReplyDeleteI agree with both of these comments. It is sad, the lack of knowledge that people have about politics. The media is so convoluted most of the time, that it is hard to get sound facts. All too often people take what they hear in the media as fact, rather than informing themselves. And sadly, in most of my experiences, the conservatives that I talk to are far less likely to be self-sufficient in retrieving sound information, they generally rely on Fox News and that is as far as it goes.
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