The People Most Confident in Their Political Views Know the Least About Politics
The curious link between ignorance, certainty, and politics
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When it comes to politics, confidence and competence don’t always go hand in hand. In fact, often they go in opposite directions: The people with the least political knowledge are the most confident that they’ve got everything figured out - as shown in the figure below. (FOK = feeling of knowing; CJ = confidence judgments.)
The figure comes from a paper by Erika Fulton and colleagues. Here’s the abstract:
Accurate metacognition is essential to informed political decisions and preventing the spread of misinformation, but research on metacognitive monitoring of political facts, outside of misinformation studies, has not met metacognitive research measurement standards. We addressed this limitation and assessed potential factors (political knowledge, political orientation, and cognitive style) related to this type of metacognitive monitoring accuracy. A sample of 216 Amazon Mechanical Turk participants completed measures of political orientation, political knowledge, and cognitive style, along with a test of political metacognitive monitoring accuracy, between February 2021 and March 2022. Participants were generally overconfident in their political knowledge, especially those with less political knowledge and who were more conservative, with conservatives also showing worse relative metacognitive accuracy. Cognitive style partially explained differences due to political orientation. Our participants were U.S. residents and disproportionately White, male, and lower-to-middle income, so studies of other samples and political contexts are needed for generalizability. Results also build on cue theory, showing that political knowledge and political orientation can act as metacognitive judgment cues. The study highlights the need to improve political metacognitive monitoring accuracy and reveals three targets for intervention: political knowledge, political orientation, and cognitive style.
You can access the paper here or request a free copy here.
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