The most obvious case, it goes without saying, is that of the proto-fascist misogynist who’s running for US president
Anyone with more than a passing interest in psychology has surely heard, by now, of the Dunning-Kruger effect – the cognitive bias whereby incompetent people are so incompetent they don’t realise how incompetent they are. (The classic case involved a bank robber who was stunned to be caught; he’d assumed that smearing his face with lemon juice would render him invisible to security cameras.) This is overconfidence of an especially scary kind, because it’s not just a case of talented people exaggerating their talents, but of the untalented feeling disproportionately talented – because they’re untalented. The phenomenon is presumably as old as humanity, but recently, watching and reading the news on both sides of the Atlantic, it’s hard to shake the sense that we’re crossing some kind of threshold. Historians of the future may refer to ours as the Dunning-Kruger era.
The most obvious case, it goes without saying, is that of the proto-fascist misogynist who’s running (at the time of writing, anyway) for president of the United States. It’s not simply that he wouldn’t know how to govern, but that he doesn’t know he wouldn’t know. The British politicians so breezily confident they could handle the results of a Brexit referendum – from Cameron to Gove and Johnson to May – would also seem to fit the bill. But the greatest hazard, with Dunning-Kruger, is imagining it can’t apply to you. (That’s kind of the point of it, after all.) So all of us who thought Brexit or Donald Trump’s nomination impossible must likewise ask ourselves: were we so ill-informed about the world outside our bubbles that this actually boosted our confidence in our judgments?
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