Partisanship, Political Knowledge, and the Dunning‐Kruger Effect

A widely-cited finding in social psychology holds that individuals with low levels of competence will judge themselves to be higher-achieving than they really are. In the present study, I examine how the so-called 'Dunning-Kruger effect' conditions citizens' perceptions of political knowledgeability. While low performers on a political knowledge task are expected to engage in overconfident self-placement and self-assessment when reflecting on their performance, I also expect the increased salience of partisan identities to exacerbate this phenomenon due to the effects of directional motivated reasoning. Survey experimental results confirm the Dunning-Kruger effect in the realm of political knowledge. They also show that individuals with moderately low political expertise rate themselves as increasingly politically knowledgeable when partisan identities are made salient. This below-average group is also likely to rely on partisan source cues to evaluate the political knowledge of peers. In a concluding section, I comment on the meaning of these findings for contemporary debates about rational ignorance, motivated reasoning, and political polarization. Acknowledgements: The author wishes to thank Carolyn Forestiere, William Blake, Simon Stacey, Marc Hetherington, Laura Bucci, Chris Anson, Chris DeSante, Elizabeth Holz, Tom Schaller, and Tyson King-Meadows for their comments and assistance on earlier versions of this work. All errors and omissions remain my own. A widely-studied phenomenon in social psychology holds that individuals with low levels of competence will judge themselves to be more competent than they really are, while those with high levels of competence will underestimate their excellence (see also Dunning, 2011; Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross, 2005; Kruger & Dunning, 1999). This so-called Dunning-Kruger effect is composed of several interrelated phenomena, thought to occur because individuals vary in their awareness of "known unknowns" (concepts, skills, or experiences that one is aware of, but which have not yet been mastered) relative to "unknown unknowns" (which fall outside of an individual's cognizance). As a result, low achievers are unaware of the extent of their ignorance because they are lacking in metacognitive skills (e.g., Everson & Tobias, 1998). This "double burden of incompetence" (Dunning, 2011, p. 260) means that low-performing individuals often overestimate their own objective performance. A second and related aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that these low-achievers will be less capable of rating and comparing peers' performances (Helzer & Dunning, 2012; Hodges, Regehr, & Martin, 2001). Paradoxically, these phenomena combine to affect the ability of low achievers to overcome their incompetence, because they are unaware that they lag behind others until their objective performance is measured and reported to them. The only way to increase proficiency is to increase metacognition, and vice versa (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). 2 Critics of the Dunning-Kruger effect have argued that the phenomenon is most likely to occur not because individuals lack metacomprehension, but rather because their preexisting knowledge is biased (e.g., Krajc & Ortmann, 2008). Further empirical demonstrations have shown that individuals' overconfident self-assessments are not a product of the distribution of task scores or other statistical artifacts (Schlösser, Dunning, Johnson, & Kruger, 2013). 3 The Dunning-Kruger thesis also holds that top performers on tasks are likely to discount their exceptionalism, rating themselves as lower-achieving than they should (e.g., Schlösser et al., 2013). The phenomena which comprise the Dunning-Kruger effect have substantial consequences for contemporary theories of political knowledge. Political knowledge informs the perceived social utility of engaging in political discussion (David, 2009; Eveland Jr, 2002; Neuman, 1986), whether to seek additional knowledge from preferred sources (e.g., Cowen, 2005; Redlawsk, 2004), and whether to adopt ideologically extreme positions (Ortoleva & Snowberg, 2015a). Overconfident citizens may become emboldened, making strong political assertions in their social networks and resisting persuasive counterarguments. Despite these potentially important consequences, modern political scientists have only occasionally examined the subjects of political overand underconfidence, and have never engaged in a direct test of the DunningKruger effect. Overconfidence may also influence the way that partisans assess the political knowledge of others (Leeper & Slothuus, 2014). Partisanship causes individuals to raise "perceptual screens" which increase the likelihood of believing congenial partisan stereotypes, and which also reduce partisans' willingness to believe disconfirming narratives (e.g., Kunda, 1990). This motivated reasoning process causes partisans to possess biased characterizations of the political knowledge of out-group and in-group members, and may lead to increases in overconfidence when partisanship is made salient. Existing literature therefore identifies two important outstanding research questions. First, to what extent do contemporary Americans overestimate their levels of 4 By confidence in political knowledge, I do not refer to political efficacy, which instead relates to the feeling that political action is possible and impactful (Balch, 1974; Campbell, Gurin, & Miller, 1954). 5 A JSTOR search of major political science journals and a Google Scholar keyword search for "dunning" produced several articles which mention the theory (e.g., Cowen, 2005; Lassen & Serritzlew, 2011; Weissberg, 2001), but no study incorporated its expectations in a research design. political knowledge? And perhaps more important given the increasingly-polarized context of contemporary political discourse: how do partisan identities condition this phenomenon? In the present study, I examine political overconfidence using a survey experimental research design. Two online survey experiments designed to measure political knowledge corroborate the original Dunning-Kruger effect in the realms of self-assessment, self-placement, and peer assessment. Further, the studies experimentally manipulate the salience of partisanship in the minds of respondents by priming partisanship through simple cues (Bullock, 2011; e.g., Klar, 2013). Results show that the increased salience of partisanship exacerbates gaps between perceived and actual levels of political knowledge---but only among partisans with moderately low performance on the knowledge battery. Party cues also interfere with these low-performing partisans' ability to accurately assess the political knowledge of inand out-party peers. Higherachieving and extremely low-achieving respondents, in contrast, are relatively unresponsive to party cues. In a concluding section, I comment on the meaning of these findings for contemporary theories of political knowledge, partisan motivated reasoning, and political engagement. Political Overconfidence Across the disciplines, a multitude of studies has sought to measure overconfidence on objective task performance. Scholars have largely focused on three types of self-evaluation. Perhaps the most popular subject of study is over-estimation, in which individuals feel their performance on a task is better than it actually is (e.g., Sheldon, Dunning, & Ames, 2014). Over-placement, or the "Lake Wobegon" effect, in which individuals rate their performance as higher than average, is also an important subject in prior literature (Dunning, Heath, & Suls, 2004; e.g., Svenson, 1981). Finally, studies of over-precision show that many individuals believe they possess more accurate information about a concept than they actually do (Ortoleva & Snowberg, 2015a; e.g., Soll & Klayman, 2004). Despite these many advances, no existing study of political knowledge has appraised overestimation or over-placement from the perspective of the Dunning-Kruger framework. Some extant research designs have examined political over-precision from a cross-sectional perspective: Ortoleva & Snowberg (2015a) examine this aspect of overconfidence as a predictor of ideological extremeness and strength of partisanship. The authors develop a theory of imperfect information processing which demonstrates a "correlational neglect" phenomenon, in which citizens fail to recognize and compensate for the fact that their own experiences are not highly informative of the consequences of public policy. As a result, those who suffer from correlational neglect will exhibit strengthened partisanship, ideological extremism, and increased voter turnout (Ansolabehere, Meredith, & Snowberg, 2014; see also Ortoleva & Snowberg, 2015b). 6 On Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor would introduce the fictional town of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota as a place where "the women are strong, the men are good looking, and all the children are above average". 7 Political knowledge has been variously defined since the advent of modern political behavior research. It can be differentiated from political sophistication, a more encompassing concept which relates to knowledge, awareness, and ideological constraint (e.g., Converse, 1964; Luskin, 1990). According to Luskin (1990, 332), "a person is politically sophisticated to the extent to which his or her political cognitions are numerous, cut a wide substantive swath, and are highly organized, or constrained. " A more concise description in this vein is political expertise. A second strand of political science literature has investigated the link between certainty and knowledgeability in the political realm. The majority of such studies has examined the relationship between confidence in political perceptions and opinions on policies. Druckman (2004) shows that those citizens who are most susceptible to framing efforts are often highly confident in their political beliefs---a finding that squares well