Explanation for Dan Quayle, Sarah Palin and George W. Bush's opinions of themselves? Dunning-Kruger [View all]

[stevenleser]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes."

I think Dunning-Kruger effect explains a lot of Republican politicians, like Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle, George W. Bush.

"Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

1.tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
2.fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
3.fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
4.recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve."
--------------------------------------------

I think that if you pair Dunning-Kruger's posits with the American electorate's general bias against people who seem to be smarter than themselves and you basically get some of the more significant reason the Republican Party is successful. Incompetent people who think they are capable but whose inadequacies and lack of congnitive abilities are apparent and an electorate who likes to vote for dumb people. It's a match made in...well...it's a match anyway.