Well I had never heard of this before but it seems quite logical to me as I usually making the assumption that if I managed to make the grade to do something then others will have done so too on average.
The basic premise is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.[1]
As David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University conclude: “The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”[1]
An interesting read. But the real problem in my opinion is simply that people tend to either vote simply to feather there own nests or are fooled by alarmist propaganda. Some of course do not think at all and perhaps thats the majority 🙂
Politicians. Their reputation is very poor. In fairness, this is largely their own fault, but it would be foolish to assume every politician is like this. If they were, the whole infrastructure would collapse before you could say “can I claim this on expenses?” Still, everyone assumes they’re despicable, so always assume the worst.
Politician enacts a bad policy? They’re a terrible person. They change their mind and reverse it? They’re weak and not fit to lead. Politicians promise improvements (cut taxes, increase spending)? They’re obviously lying. Politicians promise to do something unpopular (raise taxes, cut spending)? A cast-iron guarantee it will happen. It’s a lose-lose situation, so why do they bother? Many politicians are clearly in it for themselves, but there surely are plenty who really do want the best and just put up with the negative opinions they get.
So, for the record, not all politicians are idiots (although your definition of idiot may vary). But plenty are. The US seem particularly afflicted with them; Sarah Palin, Ted Cruz, these people were/are contenders for the presidency. And the archetype George W Bush WAS the president. For 8 YEARS. The man whose idiotic musings managed to sustain businesses had a nuclear arsenal at his command.
Plenty of people are quick to point out that Boris Johnson is actually very intelligent/dangerous, that he’s only pretending to be a buffoon. But this underscores the point; an intelligent person has to feign stupidity to achieve political success.
What’s going on here? Logically, you’d want an intelligent person who understands the best approach and methods for running a country in the best possible way. But no, people seem drawn to demonstrations of questionable intellectual abilities. There are a wide variety of ideological, cultural, social, historical, financial and other factors involved, because politics incorporates all of these things, but there are also some known psychological processes that may contribute to this phenomenon.
Confidence inspires confidence
Politicians always try to appear confident, like Prime Minister David Cameron, pictured here confidently exaggerating the size of his… stimulus package.Photograph: Philip Toscano/PA
Confident people are more convincing. This is has been demonstrated in many studies. Most studies focus on a courtroom setting, and suggest a confident witness is more convincing to a jury than a nervous, hesitant one (which obviously has worrying implications for justice), but it can be seen elsewhere. It’s a phenomenon used-car salesmen and estate agents have exploited for decades. And politicians are clearly aware of it, hence all the media training and PR management; any politician that doesn’t come across as assured and confident gets (metaphorically) destroyed. So confidence is important in politics.
However, the Dunning-Kruger effect reveals that less-intelligent people are usually incredibly confident. More intelligent people, by contrast, aren’t at all. Self-appraisal is a useful metacognitive skill, but one that requires intelligence; if you don’t have much of it, you don’t consider yourself flawed or ignorant, because technically you don’t have the ability to do so.
So if you want an intrinsically confident person to publically represent your political party, an intelligent person would be a bad choice in many ways. This can backfire though; studies have shown that when a confident person is shown to be wrong/lying, they are then considered far less reliable or trustworthy than an unconfident person. This may explain the negative image of politics, which is mostly a series of confident individuals making big promises and failing miserably to keep them. That sort of thing really puts people off.
Politics is complicated
Many things about politics are complex, like how to eat a bacon sandwich properly in public.Photograph: Ben Cawthra/REX
Effectively running a country of tens of millions, all of which have different requirements and demands, is an incredibly complicated job. There are just so many variables that need to be considered. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to condense all this into a convenient soundbite for use with the modern media, so personalities tend to come to the fore more often. And the less intelligent personalities are more confident, so are more persuasive, and so on.
People are often put off by intellectual and complex subjects and discussions in any case. They may have no experience with the issue, or may find it too daunting to want to engage with, because doing so successfully would require a lot of time and effort. But politics, particularly democracy, requires people to be involved.
Personality studies suggest that many people demonstrate goal orientation, a “disposition toward developing or demonstrating ability in achievement situations”. Feeling that you are actively influencing something (e.g. an Election) is a powerful motivator, but if some knowledgeable type starts spouting big words about interest rates or health trust deficit management, this is going to alienate those who don’t follow or grasp such things. So if a confident person says there’s a simple solution or promises to make the big complicated thing go away, they’re going to seem far more appealing.
This is also demonstrated by Parkinson’s law of triviality, where people will spend far more time and effort focussing on something trivial that they do understand than something complicated that they don’t. The former offers far more scope for contribution and influence. And people do love trivial things, ergo less-intelligent people condensing down the big issues into brief (but inaccurate) snippets is a potential vote-winner.
People like to relate
Many people said they felt they’d like a beer with George W. Bush. Admittedly, not everyone was specific about where they’d like it to be inserted.Photograph: TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images
One of the often-cited qualities of George W Bush was that people felt they could “have a beer with him”. Ergo, they felt they could relate to him. By contrast, elitism is a negative quality. The idea that those running the country are outside the norms of society is alarming to many, hence constant efforts by politicians to “fit in”.
The majority of people are prone to numerous subconscious biases, prejudices, stereotyping and prefer their own “groups”. None of these things are particularly logical and invariably are not supported by actual evidence and reality, and people really don’t like being told things they don’t want to hear. People are also keenly aware of social status; we need to feel we are superior to others in some way to maintain our sense of self-worth. As a result, someone more intelligent saying complicated things that contain uncomfortable (but accurate) facts isn’t going to appeal to anyone, but someone demonstrably less-intelligent is not challenging to someone’s perceived social status, and if they’re going to say simple things that support inherent prejudices and deny uncomfortable facts, then so much the better.
It’s an unfortunate situation, but it just seems to be the way people’s minds work. There’s a lot more to it than what’s mentioned here of course, but including that would make the whole thing more complicated, and that’s no way to get people to like something, as should be obvious by now.
Dean Burnett thinks democracy would be perfect if it weren’t for all the people involved. He’s on Twitter, @garwboy
Music can inspire, move, even devastate, like few cultural forms. Its functions and roles differ: making that morning jogor an afternoon of exam revision bearable, the backdrop to millions of unforgettable nights out, the comfort blanket after the traumatic end of a relationship.
Music can date our lives like the rings of a tree trunk. We sometimes listen to a song because it conjures up a period of our lives. And because of its raw emotional power, music has the potential to make us contemplate social injustice more effectively than any column the likes of me can churn out. Yet this function has been neglected – partly by circumstance, partly by conspiracy.
When I told friends or acquaintances that I was going to be the Brit award-winning singer Paloma Faith’s support act, the response was a mixture of bafflement and concern that either my career or life was going to end in a volley of bottles at London’s O2 arena. I shared their nerves, though comforted myself with the positive response I received when I took to the stage at Glastonbury to rail against injustice and nuclear weapons in 2013. This audience would be rather different, it was pointed out. Faith was taking a risk, too, but her courage and strength inspired me. The daughter of a Spanish immigrant, fed up with the scapegoating of those at the bottom and the failure to hold those at the top to account, concerned that a disillusioned electorate would not use their hard-won democratic rights, she wanted to find new ways to engage her fans. But here’s what moved me: she wanted to rebuild a link between music and politics that was once strong, but which has been heavily eroded.
Politics and music once blossomed. When the US was convulsed by struggles over civil rights and the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s, music reflected many of the contemporary traumas. Marvin Gaye’s anguish at the social ills of the era was voiced in songs such as What’s Going On. “Vietnam, police brutality, social conditions, a lot of stuff,” he said at the time. “With the world exploding around me, how am I supposed to keep singing love songs?” I remember singing Pete Seeger’s pained anti-war anthem Where Have All the Flowers Gone at primary school; little did I know how he and other politicised musicians such as Paul Robeson were hounded and persecuted by the McCarthyites for speaking out.
There was Bob Dylan, of course, capturing the upsurge in challenges to the US social order in 1964 with The Times they are a-Changin’. He was consciously allied to the insurgent struggles for emancipation, saying later: “The civil rights movement and the folk music movement were pretty close for a while and allied together at that time.” The blue-collar hero Bruce Springsteen was radicalised by Ronald Reagan, and – rather like Paloma Faith – railed against the demonisation of immigrants. Hip-hop is often portrayed as corrupted by hyper-commercialism and rampant individualism, but Public Enemy incited rebellion among US youth in the late 1980s.
The marriage of music and struggles against an unjust status quo is a global phenomenon, of course. Chile’s Victor Jara – Latin America’s very own Bob Dylan – was part of the movement that culminated in Salvador Allende’s election. Shot dead by August Pinochet’s henchmen, he penned a poem in his final hours: “Silence and screams are the end of my song”. From the struggle against Nigeria’s military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s, Fela Kuti founded the entire musical genre of Afrobeat. As if to underline the potentially subversive power of music, the Russian authorities had Pussy Riot locked up in 2012 for singing against Putinism in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour.
And then there’s the political music traditions of Britain too, of course. When Thatcherism stripped industry from swaths of the country, entire communities were left without work or hope. With despair growing, no wonder the Specials’ Ghost Town resonated in 1981. Red Wedge brought together musicians united against Thatcherism, including Billy Bragg, Madness and Paul Weller.
Yes, politicised musicians are still there, but all too often they are deprived of a mainstream platform. What happened? It’s complex, certainly. Like much of the media and popular culture generally, barriers have been erected that prevent those from non-privileged backgrounds from making it. From acting to journalism to music, it is those who can afford to live off the bank of Mum and Dad who are favoured: everything from the housing crisis to the benefit sanctioning regime help see off musical acts with limited financial means. The accelerated commercialisation of music hasn’t helped either: the big businesses dominating mainstream music are hardly sympathetic when it comes to musicians sticking it to the man. There’s fear: speak out, and the Daily Mail will retaliate with a series of hatchet-jobs on your personal life. And then there’s the general decline of the left: all those defeats under Thatcherism, the disappointments of the New Labour era, the unabashed free-market triumphalism of the post-Cold War era.
No era lasts forever, of course. That celebrities such as Paloma Faith, Russell Brand and Michael Sheen are speaking out about politics is symptomatic of a broader trend. There is a rich seam of disillusionment with Britain’s current social order, and it occasionally bubbles to the surface. It is often directionless, lacking a coherent alternative in which to invest hope and truth, and frequently contradictory. But it is there all the same.
The current election campaign will be marked by character assassinations, while the Britain of food banks, zero-hours, in-work poverty, housing crisis, job insecurity and young people facing a future bleaker than their parents will not be given the hearing it deserves. When I supported Paloma, no bottles were thrown: the crowd (some who I’m sure were pretty bemused) listened politely and cheered me at the end, no doubt with varying degrees of enthusiasm.
Let’s be honest, though; even well-intentioned commentators and politicians fail to stir popular emotions about the great causes of our time. Music, though, can reach us where modern formal politics often does not: our hearts. Love and loss always have their place in music. But there are other traditions, too, and maybe our musicians should start rediscovering them.
This article titled “Democracy v Psychology: why people keep electing idiots” was written by Dean Burnett, for theguardian.com on Thursday 2nd April 2015 06.05 UTC
You must be logged in to post a comment.