Can Trump supporters give us a clue to blind Buhari supporters?

An article in the American Politico magazine about the psychological profile of Donald Trump supporters may give us some insight into the mob of rabid, unreflective, one-dimensional Buhari supporters on social media who passionately defend their oppression because it is inflicted on them by a man they “trust.” I can understand a well-fed, middle- or […]

An article in the American Politico magazine about the psychological profile of Donald Trump supporters may give us some insight into the mob of rabid, unreflective, one-dimensional Buhari supporters on social media who passionately defend their oppression because it is inflicted on them by a man they “trust.” I can understand a well-fed, middle- or upper middle-class person defending fuel price increases and withdrawal of other subsidies that benefit the poor. But when a person who is barely getting by, who is unable to feed because the prices of everything have gone up, who hasn’t been paid salaries for the past eight months or longer, defends his condition and the person responsible for his condition, you know something isn’t screwed right somewhere. Such a person, of course, deserves his condition.
This essay you will read below was written by David Dunning, a University of Michigan experimental social psychologist, and was originally titled: ‘The Psychological Quirk That Explains Why You Love Donald Trump.’ It has been edited for space.
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.”
But as a psychologist who has studied human behavior-including voter behavior- for decades, I think there is something deeper going on. The problem isn’t that voters are too uninformed. It is that they don’t know just how uninformed they are.
Psychological research suggests that people, in general, suffer from what has become known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. They have little insight about the cracks and holes in their expertise. In studies in my research lab, people with severe gaps in knowledge and expertise typically fail to recognise how little they know and how badly they perform. To sum it up, the knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognise that one is not good at that task- and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at that task. This includes political judgment.
We have found this pattern in logical reasoning, grammar, emotional intelligence, financial literacy, numeracy, firearm care and safety, debate skill, and college coursework. Others have found a similar lack of insight among poor chess players, unskilled medical lab technicians, medical students unsuccessfully completing an obstetrics/gyneacology rotation, and people failing a test on performing CPR.
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 recognise those gaffes as missteps.
Here is more evidence. In a telling series of experiments, Paul Fernbach and colleagues asked political partisans to rate their understanding of various social policies, such as imposing sanctions on Iran, instituting a flat tax, or establishing a single-payer health system.
Survey takers expressed a good deal of confidence about their expertise. Or rather, they did until researchers put that understanding to the test by asking them to describe in detail the mechanics of two of the policies under question. This challenge led survey takers to realise that their understanding was mostly an illusion. It also led them to moderate their stances about those policies and to donate less money, earned in the experiment, to like-minded political advocacy groups.
Again, the key to the Dunning-Kruger Effect is not that unknowledgeable voters are uninformed; it is that they are often misinformed – their heads filled with false data, facts and theories that can lead to misguided conclusions held with tenacious confidence and extreme partisanship, perhaps some that make them nod in agreement with Trump at his rallies.
But why now? If voters can be so misinformed that they don’t know that they are misinformed, why only now has a candidate like Trump arisen? My take is that the conditions for the Trump phenomenon have been in place for a long time. At least as long as quantitative survey data have been collected, citizens have shown themselves to be relatively ill-informed and incoherent on political and historical matters.
But the Dunning-Kruger perspective also suggests a cautionary tale that extends well beyond the Trump voter. The Trump phenomenon may provide only an extravagant and visible example in which voters fail to spot a political figure who seems to be making it up as he goes along.
But the key lesson of the Dunning-Kruger framework is that it applies to all of us, sooner or later. Each of us at some point reaches the limits of our expertise and knowledge. Those limits make our misjudgments that lie beyond those boundaries undetectable to us.
As such, if we find ourselves worried about the apparent gullibility of the Trump voter, which may be flamboyant and obvious, we should surely worry about our own naive political opinions that are likely to be more nuanced, subtle, and invisible – but perhaps no less consequential. We all run the risk of being too ill-informed to notice when our own favoured candidates or national leaders make catastrophic misjudgments.
Thomas Jefferson once observed that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be.” The Trump phenomenon makes visible something that has been true for quite some time now. As a citizenry, we can be massively ill-informed. Yet, our society remains relatively free.
How have we managed so far to maintain what Jefferson suggested could never be? And how do we ensure this miracle of democracy continues? This is the real issue. And it will be with us far after the Trumpian political revolution or reality TV spectacle, depending on how you see it, has long flickered off the electronic screens of our cultural theatre.