When
George W. Bush became president in 2001, it marked the first time in 70
years that conservative Republicans controlled all three branches of
government. By the time Bush left office, we were all reminded why. The
financial crisis and resulting global economic meltdown Bush left us
with were eerily reminiscent of the Great Depression, but there was also
9/11, the Iraq War and Katrina—a multifaceted record of spectacular
failure so stunning that it
disqualified conservative Republicans from holding power for at least another seven decades. Yet, the Democrats’
response to the many messes Bush left behind has been so spectacularly
inept that they’ve not only lost both houses of Congress, they’ve also
lost more state legislative seats than any time since
the Great Recession.
There
are many ways one might explain this state of affairs—and certainly the
rise of Wall Street Democrats and the decline of labor played crucial
roles. But beyond any particular issue area, there’s also the matter of
differences in how liberals and conservatives think—and how they act and
organize as a result.
,
a growing body of literature reveals that liberals and conservatives
think differently from one another in ways that can even be traced back,
in part, to the level of instinctual response, reflecting
conservatives’ heightened sensitivity to threat bias. This work is
congruent with an integrated multi-factor account offered by John Jost
and three co-authors in the 2003 meta-analysis “
.”
In their abstract, they explained, “Analyzing political conservatism
as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality
(authoritarianism, dogmatism–intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and
existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management),
and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system
justification).” Their meta-analysis integrated findings from 88 sample
studies in 12 countries, with 22,818 individual subjects—meaning it drew
on a substantial body of work by others.
Yet,
once publicized, it drew such a hostile response there was even talk of
Congress defunding the entire field of research into political
attitudes. In response, Jost and one co-author wrote a Washington Post
Op-Ed, which defused the crisis. In it, they wrote:
True,
we find some support for the traditional “rigidity-of-the-right”
hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on
the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive
and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity — all of which may be liabilities
in mass politics and other public and professional domains.
This
statement underscores the point that liberal cognitive tendencies can
be as problematic in their way as conservative ones are.
The
multi-factor distinction Jost and his colleagues analyzed is roughly
congruent with a broader distinction, discussed by Chris Mooney in”
The Republican Brain” (which I wrote about
here), related to two of the “
Big Five” personality traits—conservatives score higher on conscientiousness, while liberals score higher on openness to new experience.
As
these few examples suggest, there are multiple ways to characterize the
differences in how liberals and conservatives think. For instance,
Mooney argued that liberals, still fundamentally inspired by the
Enlightenment promise of ever-growing knowledge about the world, are
fundamentally mistaken about the nature of human reason, which they see
as knowledge- and truth-seeking. But modern cognitive science teaches us
that our brains are much more fundamentally shaped by the need to make
persuasive arguments, which only require the appearance of rational
argument.
In “
The Battle for God,” Karen Armstrong illuminates a slightly different, though related, difference, contrasting the modalities of
mythos and
logos. As Armstrong explains,
logos is concerned with the practical understanding of how things work in the world, while
mythos
is concerned with ultimate meaning. Either modality can be used by
liberals and conservatives alike in their everyday lives. But
macro-historically, there’s been a distinct bias—and weird twist on top
of it—at least since the dawn of the modern era. That’s when
logos began becoming so all-pervasive that it seemed destined to dislodge
mythos, and some defenders of
mythos (now commonly known as fundamentalists) fought back paradoxically by assuming the framework of
logos, and arguing that their
mythos
was literally true—a move that true traditionalists would have found to
be deeply in error, because it devalued the essential purpose of
mythos.
The congruence with Mooney’s argument is obvious: There’s a clear kinship between
logos and the Enlightenment model of reason on the one hand, and
mythos and persuasion on the other. If conservatives under George W. Bush once again proved themselves incompetent in the
logos of governing, liberals under Obama proved themselves incompetent in its
mythos.
Or
so I hypothesized. But I wanted to check things out with perhaps the
world’s leading expert on incompetence, psychologist David Dunning, the
senior researcher in the team that discovered the Dunning-Kruger effect,
which Wikpedepia defines as “a
cognitive bias whereby unskilled individuals suffer from
illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate.” Wikipedia added that “This bias is attributed to a
metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.” Or, as Dunning explained to Errol Morris, writing an essay series,
“The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is,” for
the New York Times, “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re
incompetent … [T]he skills you need to produce a right answer are
exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.” A
recent article by Dunning, “
We Are All Confident Idiots,” provides both humorous and serious examples showing just how pervasive the problem is.
Like many, I first learned of the Dunning-Kruger effect from that NYT series—and
made some observations based on it at the time.
There are obvious conclusions one can draw from the Dunning-Kruger
effect: perhaps most important, that none of those obvious conclusions
will apply to your own shortcomings, even though those are the ones that
ought to concern you most. But this is specifically an
individual
effect, and my observation was about groups—and rather large ones, at
that. So in reaching out to talk with Dunning, behind any specifics, I
had two questions in mind: Could it apply to groups as well as
individuals? And was it possible to do something about it?
In both
cases, he answered yes, but some of the specifics surprised me. Which
is just what I should have expected—to discover some limits of my own
understanding. (Dunning himself has referenced Donald Rumsfeld’s phrase
“unknown unknowns” to describe what we’re up against, just by the very
nature of being human. But don’t have a cow, man. He’s also referenced
Socrates, as well.)
To begin with, I wanted to make sure we were
on the same page. An example that came readily to mind was the GOP’s
claims to have 46 jobs bills that had passed the House, and were
languishing in the Senate. If only Obama and Harry Reid would act on
them! The reality, of course, is that these bills would not actually do
very much in the way of job creation, as critics have pointed out
repeatedly over the past several years. In late October, the New York
Times even
interviewed some top GOP economists who admitted as much, along with independent analysts who said it would be hard to measure much impact.
In
short, the GOP “jobs bills” aren’t seriously intended to create jobs.
They’re intended to create talking points about creating jobs — and to
counter Democratic talking points (while also doing favors for GOP
donors, of course). They reflect both the persuasive nature of human
cognition highlighted by Chris Mooney, and the meaning-making function
of
mythos described by Karen Armstrong. They might not create
many jobs, I noted early in my conversation with Dunning—it’s aggregate
demand that’s the primary driver in doing that—but they do resonate with
the “job creator”
mythos, which has been so prominent in
conservative circles these past several years, and which makes perfect
sense in the world of small businessmen I’ve known.
Dunning
thought it was an apt example. He noted that people are often perplexed
over where a never-ending, chicken-and-egg cycle begins. “You have
business people, they don’t just decide there is going to be a market,
they respond to the market, they respond to a demand,” Dunning said.
“But they start the process where they enter the picture … People tend
to think of themselves sort of as creators who come in and are imposing
their will and their desires on the environment, and sort of filter out
the conditions that they are really reacting to. They can recognize it
pretty accurately for everybody else, they just miss that for
themselves. Which I think is interesting.”
Understanding an
example of how conservatives’ thinking leads them astray is the easy
part, however. It helped to get our thinking in sync. But the real
challenge would be making sense of how liberals and Democrats make
comparable kinds of errors—errors they cannot see. And here is where
things had to get a bit tricky, since I had some ideas of what the
errors might be, but given the Dunning-Kruger effect, I had to expect
some ideas I’d never thought of, too.
The next thing out of
Dunning’s mouth wasn’t quite that—but it did have some of that flavor.
Above I mentioned a paper by John Jost that represents the integration
of work done by hundreds, if not thousands of researchers over a period
of several decades. That integration very much represents the broad
consensus view of how liberal and conservative thought relate to one
another—a consensus that has since been significantly strengthened with
the addition of a related finding in the physiological dimension. But
there are at least two notable voices who stand out with somewhat
contrasting views—Jonathan Haidt and Dan Kahan—and Dunning quickly
mentioned both of their work as being harmonious with what I was saying.
I
could have gotten down into the details of their theories, but in a big
picture sense, Dunning was perfectly right: They’re all saying
something similar—that liberals and conservatives do think differently
from one another, which means that they can both fall prey to the
Dunning-Kruger effect in ways that
may be different—in terms of
cognitive processes—as well as similar—produced by similar sorts of
situations, for example. What’s more, if one is concerned with trying
to identify ways in which people are blind to their own shortcomings,
then it’s helpful to have as many different accounts as possible.
Kahan’s
work is particularly challenging, because he prefers to use a
two-factor model of orientation—hierarchical/egalitarian and
individualist/communitarian—rather than the single-factor measures used
by most investigators, which can then be correlated with
liberalism/conservatism. But he still does encounter and deal with
real-world political questions where things tend to divide into two. One
striking example is the “white male effect,” so-called because white
males have been observed to be significantly less fearful about certain
sorts of risks—most notably ones associated with guns and the
environment. In a
2007 paper, for example, Kahan and his colleagues wrote, “The
insensitivity to risk reflected in the white male effect can thus be seen as a defensive response to a form of
cultural identity threat that
afflicts hierarchical and individualistic white males.” Even though two
factors were involved, the result was an effect most notable for
setting one sub-population apart from the rest of the public—a cognitive
bifurcation of sorts.
“Essentially you have each side
interpreting what’s going on through different lenses,” Dunning said of
Kahan’s work, and what connects this to his work is “the idea that
people either have no idea that the other side has a different lens—they
literally don’t know it, so that if you are looking at things the
logos way, you really don’t know that there’s an alternative way of viewing the world is the
mythos
way. Or, if you are exposed to it, you think it’s not real.” Expanding
on the later alternative, Dunning said, “I can guess if you described
the
logos world to a person who was into
mythos, and
vice a versa, their response would be, well, that’s a very interesting
way of viewing the world, I wonder what took them off the right track.”
Although this made sense, my working thesis was not that most people don’t have both
mythos and
logos
in their experience—that may or may not be true—but that the political
worlds of liberalism and conservatism are organized differently, so that
only certain aspects of the personal resonate strongly with the
political.
“Well, that makes sense,” Dunning told me, then quickly
added, “I’m from the other world, though, where I find it very easy to
focus on the individual level.” Which led directly to the next question
on my mind: Is there specific evidence for the Dunning-Kruger effect
overlapping from the individual level to larger social groups?
“The
answer is, yes it can,” Dunning told me. He’s still working on writing
up experimental results, but he was happy to share some broader
observations. “It’s likely to happen in two different ways,” he said.
“The first is often you have organizations that are well set–you can say
they’re very competent–in their ways. They can have a problem when
conditions on the ground shift, and you could say that in the last 10 or
20 years, the conditions on the grounds shifted demographically, in
terms of the people, for example who vote in the midterm.” Twenty years
ago, these older voters had come of age during the Great Depression, and
leaned Democratic as a result. But older voters now are much more
Republican, which tends to skew the midterms in the opposite direction
from the past. (The age-based difference in participation rates has also
grown over time, as well.) As a result, Dunning said, “You have
Republicans in midterms, and the occasional voters now are the young,
and they’re rather Democratic so there is oscillation between elections
and that’s a changed situation,” which is precisely the first sort of
thing that tends to trip up organizations.
“The other thing is
that the most recent work we’ve done suggests that the real cost of the
Dunning-Kruger framework at the organizational level is that when a very
smart idea or very smart person comes along, the organizations are not
necessarily very skilled at recognizing that person’s genius,” Dunning
said. “We have lots of data showing that very top performers, their top
performances are very much missed. The genius of their ideas are just
missed by the group.”
Three examples on the Democratic side came
readily to mind when Dunning said this. First was civil rights lawyer
and Harvard law professor Lani Guinier, whose
work on voting rights and representational fairness
was easily demonized by the right when she was nominated to head the
DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, in part because Joe Biden (then chair of
the Senate Judiciary Committee) couldn’t understand it, and Bill Clinton
didn’t even take the time to try. Yet, in retrospect, if they had stood
behind her, most of the GOP’s voting rights mischief in the past 20
years—including the theft of the 2000 election—could have been avoided,
or defeated, and there would be a much stronger foundation for
multi-racial coalition politics at all levels of government.
Second was Princeton political scientist Jacob Hacker, who has done pioneering work on
asymmetric polarization and the
devastation of the middle class, as well as
developing the public option
as a complement to Medicare in providing insurance for those left
uninsured as employer-provided health insurance becomes increasingly
expensive and less common. In all three areas, Hacker’s thinking has
involved considerations that are mostly not even understood by those
who’ve ignored, dismissed, or, more rarely, criticized them.
Third
was University of California, Berkeley, cognitive linguist George
Lakoff, whose work illuminating the cognitive and communicative
differences between liberals and conservatives—”
Moral Politics,” “
Don’t Think of An Elephant,” “
Whose Freedom,”
etc.—has found a wide audience centered in the progressive activist
base, but has yet to seriously impact the political professionals whose
collective failure I alluded to in this story’s first paragraph.
When I
interviewed him recently for Salon, Lakoff even highlighted the concept of hypocognition—that “we
don’t have
all the ideas we need.” One example he cited was the concept of
reflexivity, “the fact that thought is part of the world. That when
you’re thinking, it’s not separate from reality, it’s part of reality.
And if your understanding of the world is reflected in what you do, then
that thought comes into the world through your actions,” which helps to
explain, in part, the power of conservative
mythos, even when it’s mistaken as a matter of fact, a matter of
logos.
Lakoff also pointed out that “Hypocognition
itself is
an idea that we need.” There are things going on in our social and
political world that we don’t have names for—and because we don’t have
names for them, we can’t think and talk about them coherently. So, we
have conservatives on the one hand acting on their
mythos, mistakenly believing it’s true as a matter of
logos—which
is one kind of incompetence—and yet, nonetheless reshaping reality
through the power of reflexivity. (Think of how invading Iraq in
response to 9/11 helped bring ISIS into existence, for example.) On the
other hand, we have liberals seeing things only in terms of
logos,
who can’t understand how wildly mistaken conservatives can nonetheless
reshape the world to reflect their paranoid fantasies, because they’re
missing the crucial concept of reflexivity (and even the very concept of
missing concepts, the concept of hypocognition)—which is another, very
different, but very real form of incompetence.
So, when Dunning
told me, “The genius of their ideas are just missed by the group,”
Lakoff’s discussion of hypocognition naturally came to mind. What could
be a worse idea to miss than the very idea of missing ideas? If you
don’t think they’re out there, you’ll never go looking for them—never
believe anyone who claims to have found one of them, either.
In
fact, Democrats appear to face a situation in which both the phenomena
Dunning pointed to are happening at once. The demographic shift in
midterm voters has happened in the same time frame that Guinier, Hacker
and Lakoff have been writing, arguing for new ways of doing things, and
more often than not seeing the genius of their ideas being “just missed
by the group.”
Dunning also suggested that collective cognitive
differences could manifest in group blind spots. “If you’re in a group
that tends things in a
logos box or a
mythos box you
may very well not know that the other box exists,” Dunning said. “It
just doesn’t occur to you even though, as you mentioned before, in
everyday life you are probably switching from a mythos to logos person.”
“I
think the best examples come from cross-cultural understanding,” he
quickly added. “That is, what we don’t know happens in other
cultures—you know, their ideas, the meanings of certain actions, certain
concerns that just don’t occur to us because we grew up in the United
States, as supposed to Japan or China or Africa, for example. So if you
think about the
mythos/logos distinction as cultural distinction, it wouldn’t be surprising that there are ‘unknown unknowns.’”
Dunning
then went on to cite “some empirical work being done by Rob Willer and
Matthew Feinberg … showing that you can get ‘the other side’ to support
your side more if you make sure to approach or political arguments into
language or have it address the concerns of the other side. So, for
example, if you talk about environmentalism as maintaining the purity of
the earth, and get conservatives much much more excited about the idea
of sustainability and environmentalism.” [Article press release
here.]
On the other hand, they also showed that emphasizing the military’s
role in providing equal opportunities for minorities impacts liberals to
make them more supportive of the military—so adopting different basic
frameworks can reach people on both sides of the ideological divide.
Their research doesn’t show that differences are erased, but they can be
diminished, which is a start.
I started this article by taking
note of the colossal failures of the Bush administration, in part
because they’re so staggering that they’re impossible to miss. But
Dunning cautioned against being misdirected. “The real effect of
suffering from Dunning-Kruger is not that you suffer obvious losses but
that there are so many opportunities you will never notice, or know
about in your life,” Dunning said, “and that’s absolutely true that the
collective level … People at collective level are going to make
mistakes, even if they’re expertly interested in doing the best they
possibly can.”
While Dunning already touched on one reason for
this—a collective failure to appreciate new, breakthrough ideas—he now
turned to an opposite kind of problem, failures that can come from a
lack of group coherence, from people seeming to work together, while
actually having significantly different sorts of goals. “I have often
wondered, if everybody has a hymnal, is everybody’s hymnal the same,”
Dunning said. “So for political operatives, sometimes I wonder if their
task is to get candidates elected or to make sure that they earn enough
money from the election that they can live a good life, and can continue
to have their political business.” It’s a question many in netroots
have raised repeatedly over the years.
It’s not limited to
politics, of course. Dunning also cited a similar problem in the
business world, where “if you’re a CEO, you get graded on how well you
do this past quarter, so the task is to maximize profit for this
quarter. And that may not be the best strategy in the long-term.”
More
generally, Dunning said, “Whenever you see somebody acting in what
looks like an incompetent way you have to ask yourself if they actually
perceive themselves doing a different task than what you think they’re
doing, and being very competent in [that task].” He cited an example
from his own experience, a dean at a university he had observed, who
“would speak in non sequiturs,” hardly a sign of intellectual
competence, “until I realized this task was to outlast everybody, just
so he got his way, and that he was brilliant. But if you thought his
task was to bring many minds in together, and come to an understanding …
no, that was not the task.”
What all these examples seem to suggest is that we
can
identify potential sources of failure—even if we can’t see them all.
We will always be limited in our understanding—and limited in our
understanding of our understanding. But we can still make progress,
nonetheless, particularly if we stay mindful of our limitations.
Dunning
offered two broad observations of what groups can do in this regard
when they encounter recognizable failure—which would seem to be the most
opportune time for change. First, he said, was to do “an honest autopsy
of what just happened, and then to actually apply the lessons of that
autopsy, as opposed to just go through the exercise and then do what you
did the last time.” Dunning specifically noted the need to “talk to a
lot of people, including people who might be opponents, people who
certainly have an opposing view to people of your own, politically.” The
Republicans’ post-2012 autopsy doesn’t exactly look like it meets these
criteria—but the midterm electoral disconnect Dunning mentioned earlier
“saved” them from suffering as a result, which might well only make it
even more difficult for them to change in the long run.
The second
way out, Dunning suggested, was turning to history—which can still be
tricky, since one must decide which historical examples are relevant,
and what the suggested answers from them are. It’s popular among
pundits, for example, to say that Bill Clinton saved the Democratic
Party by moving it to the center—a claim that rather strikingly ignores
the massive, historic losses at all levels in the 1994 election, losses
that were duplicated even more deeply in 2010, after Obama had similarly
sought to bring both sides together—and been spurned, just as Clinton
had been. Still, the general principle seems sound: by looking to
history, we can examine a situation as outsiders, and see things in it
that we may well be blind to as insiders. As with the autopsy example,
the possibility of successful reorientation is present, there is no
guarantee it will be achieved.
There’s another line of research
Dunning’s been involved with more recently, in collaboration with
Clayton Critcher of U.C. Berkeley, which struck me as having direct
relevance to my interest in bipartisan incompetence. This involves
gaining deeper insight into how people construe the inner workings of
others, based on what they know (or believe) about themselves, what
Critcher and Dunning call “egocentric pattern projection.” It was my
take, as a layman, that this could play an interesting role in how
groups come to theorize about one another—and a possible source of
blindness as well as insight.
As I explained in an email to
Dunning before the interview, “I see this as connected, because I
believe that both liberals and conservatives tend to misunderstand one
another in various ways, and that one of those ways is via projecting
self-derived assumptions onto the other. These projections both feed
into and derive strength from beliefs that their cognitive competencies
are all that’s needed to win politically, and that their cognitive
incompetencies aren’t incompetencies at all.”
As with the
Dunning-Kruger effect, egocentric pattern projection is not a wholly new
idea at bottom; it’s long been widely understood that we tend to view
the world through our own particular framework of assumptions. But,
again, it’s a matter of seeing something old in a new light. A 2009
paper they co-authored showed that “If two traits go together in the
self, then they are assumed to go together in other people. If two
traits clash in the self-concept, then they are presumed not to co-occur
in other people.” The shift from projecting traits to projecting
patterns is not only significantly more sophisticated, it opens the
doorway for a whole progression of further steps.
These weren’t
controversial or political traits, but commonplace, representative
ones—idealistic, perceptive, generous, wordly, resigned, bashful,
reserved, prideful, considerate, persistent and dependent. Which is
precisely why we’ve got every reason to believe that it’s generally
true. But how much of a leap beyond that is it to the sort of group
misunderstanding I was wondering about?
“It’s not very much,”
Dunning told me. Egocentric pattern projection “turns out in the main
to be a good thing,” he said, “because you’re a human like other people,
and it turns out you can make some good guesses about other people,”
but “It can get you into trouble when people
do think differently, like when you have this divide in terms of
mythos and
logos.”
He then went on to tell me about a new paper, not yet published,
studying how people build explanations for the patterns they perceive.
As that paper explains, “Causal trait theories—created to explain trait
co-occurrence in a single person—are exported to guide one’s implicit
personality theories about people in general.”
Obviously, once
people have such theories, they are one step closer to sharing them with
others, and through sharing, building collective theories—just the
sorts of theories that could lead liberals and conservatives to
misunderstand one another. We’re still a long way from knowing for
certain that this broadly general process underlies what’s happening in
our political culture today, but it’s starting to look more and more
likely that it is.
While Dunning and others referred to are doing
remarkable work to illuminate both the nature and limits of our
self-understanding, a nagging question remains: How much does it all
matter? By understanding how we misunderstand each other, for example,
we may find better ways to overcome misunderstanding, as the work by
Willer and Feinberg suggests. But that’s still presuming a common desire
for mutual understanding, which may be found in a laboratory setting.
But is it truly a realistic presumption to hold onto in America as a
whole today? Or is it just another broad expression of liberals’
problem-solving,
logos-based orientation, which conservatives
fundamentally reject? And does the hope of finding common ground
willfully ignore the role of reflexivity linked with conservative
counterfactual beliefs to create conditions in which bipartisan
problem-solving simply isn’t possible?
In short, it may be
heartening when cognitive research suggests roughly symmetrical
mechanisms and ways of overcoming differences, but that could be just
another example of liberal intellectuals projecting their framework of
assumptions, blinding themselves to more fundamental and intractable
differences, which conservatives are, in their own way, smart enough to
stick with and exploit, while depending on liberals’ relative
disorganization, indecision and attraction to ambiguity to allow them to
win the day, even if they can’t win an outright majority in a
presidential election any more.
Once you’re aware that the Dunning-Kruger effect is involved, it’s anybody’s guess, really, who is more incompetent than whom.
