Here’s Why Trump Is Unable To Comprehend The Excruciating Level Of His
Own Stupidity
By Samuel
Warde
A psychological principle known
as the Dunning-Kruger effect explains a lot when it comes to understanding
Trump’s inability to understand and accept his intellectual shortcomings.
Psychology Today reported the
day after Trump’s inauguration in an article titled “The Dunning-Kruger
President” that:
Named for Cornell psychologist David
Dunning and his then-grad student Justin Kruger, this is the observation that
people who are ignorant or unskilled in a given domain tend to believe they are
much more competent than they are.
Thus bad drivers believe they’re good drivers, the humorless think they know what’s funny, and people who’ve never held public office think they'[d] make a terrific president. How hard can it be?
Thus bad drivers believe they’re good drivers, the humorless think they know what’s funny, and people who’ve never held public office think they'[d] make a terrific president. How hard can it be?
The 1999 paper that launched the
Dunning-Kruger Effect was called “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in
recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” Across
4 studies, Professor Dunning and his team administered tests of humor, grammar,
and logic.
In many areas of life, incompetent
people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how
incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger
effect.
Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack.
To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent.
Poor performers — and we are all poor performers at some things — fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.
Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack.
To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent.
Poor performers — and we are all poor performers at some things — fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.
The
Dunning-Kruger President
If you do a Google search for “The
Dunning-Kruger President” you will find that several news organizations have
published articles applying the principle both before and after the 2016
presidential election.
Salon published
an article in September 2016 explaining that “Trump is not
merely ignorant. He is also supremely confident and feels superior — the most
dangerous kind of idiot,” attributing his behavior to Dunning-Kruger.
Bloomberg published
an article in May 2017 explaining that “We’re all ignorant,
but Trump takes it to a different level” in an article titled: “Trump’s
‘Dangerous Disability’? It’s the Dunning-Kruger Effect.”
Conservative author and political
commentator David Brooks published an
article for The New York Times that same
month explaining that Trump was the “all-time record-holder of the
Dunning-Kruger effect” due to his infantile lack of mastery of “three tasks
that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25.”
According to Brooks:
“First, most adults have learned to
sit still. But mentally, Trump is still a 7-year-old boy who is bouncing around
the classroom. Trump’s answers [during] interviews are not very long — 200
words at the high end — but he will typically flit through four or five topics
before ending up with how unfair the press is to him.”
“Second, most people of drinking age
have achieved some accurate sense of themselves, some internal criteria to
measure their own merits and demerits. But Trump seems to need perpetual
outside approval to stabilize his sense of self, so he is perpetually desperate
for approval, telling heroic fabulist tales about himself.”
“Third, by adulthood most people can
perceive how others are thinking. For example, they learn subtle arts such as
false modesty so they won’t be perceived as obnoxious. But Trump seems to have
not yet developed a theory of mind. Other people are black boxes that supply
either affirmation or disapproval. As a result, he is weirdly transparent. He
wants people to love him, so he is constantly telling interviewers that he is
widely loved.”
More recently, Washington Monthly reported earlier this year
that Trump “got up this morning, watched Fox And Friends do a segment
on his mental health, and used his Twitter thumbs to give the world a textbook
example of the Dunning Kruger effect.”
Now that
Russian collusion, after one year of intense study, has proven to be a total
hoax on the American public, the Democrats and their lapdogs, the Fake News
Mainstream Media, are taking out the old Ronald Reagan playbook and screaming
mental stability and intelligence…..
….Actually,
throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and
being, like, really smart. Crooked Hillary Clinton also played these cards very
hard and, as everyone knows, went down in flames. I went from VERY successful
businessman, to top T.V. Star…..
….to President
of the United States (on my first try). I think that would qualify as not
smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!
After posting those three
tweets, Washington Monthly reported that:
No stable genius has ever bragged
about what a stable genius they were. No smart person would try to convince the
world of their high IQ by using poor punctuation and 4th grade vocabulary while
using “like” as a filler word in text.
No one with an ounce of historical
awareness would argue that they retained their mental acuity by comparing
himself to the Alzheimers-afflicted Ronald Reagan.
No one who understood his legal peril would call out the FBI’s most high-profile investigation in the country as a “hoax.”
No one of sound mind would forget that they had run for President at least once before, back in the year 2000.
No one who understood his legal peril would call out the FBI’s most high-profile investigation in the country as a “hoax.”
No one of sound mind would forget that they had run for President at least once before, back in the year 2000.
The
Dunning-Kruger Effect explains Trump supporters
Politico took
the obvious next step, attributing Trump’s popularity with
some voters to the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Politico started their article, reporting that:
Many commentators have
argued that Donald Trump’s dominance in the GOP presidential race can be
largely explained by ignorance; his candidacy, after all, is most popular among
Republican voters without college degrees. Their expertise about current
affairs is too fractured and full of holes to spot that only 9 percent of
Trump’s statements are “true” or “mostly” true, according to PolitiFact,
whereas 57 percent are “false” or “mostly false”—the remainder being “pants on
fire” untruths. Trump himself has memorably declared: “I love the poorly
educated.”
Continuing, Politico explained
that: “The problem isn’t that voters are too uninformed. It is that they
don’t know just how uninformed they are.”
[Dunning-Kruger] may well be
the key to the Trump voter—and perhaps even to the man himself…. In
voters, lack of expertise would be lamentable but perhaps not so worrisome if
people had some sense of how imperfect their civic knowledge is. If they did,
they could repair it. But the Dunning-Kruger Effect suggests something
different. It suggests that some voters, especially those facing significant
distress in their life, might like some of what they hear from Trump, but they
do not know enough to hold him accountable for the serious gaffes he makes.
They fail to recognize those gaffes as missteps.
The
Dunning-Kruger Effect also explains Fox News
Actor, comedian, and screenwriter
John Cleese used the Dunning-Kruger effect to explain Fox News in a 2012 video
posted on the Monty Python YouTube page.
Cleese responded to comments posted
on their videos. “The problem with people like this is that they are so
stupid,” explained Cleese, “they have no idea how stupid they are.”
“You see, if you’re very very
stupid, how can you possibly realize that you’re very very stupid?” he
continued. “You’d have to be relatively intelligent to understand how stupid
you are.”
“There’s a wonderful bit of research
by a guy named David Dunning, a friend at Cornell I’m proud to say, who’s
pointed out that in order to know how good you are at something requires
exactly the same skills as it does to be good at that thing in the first
place,” Cleese continued, “which means – and this is terribly funny – that if
you are absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the
skills you need to know that you are absolutely no good at it.”
Continuing, he connected that
concept to Fox News.
“And this explains not just
Hollywood, but almost the entirety of Fox News.”