bobbins writes:
quote:
I cannot believe that incompetence alone is the reason. What I was trying to question was the wilfulness of ignoring of expert opinion.
Well, two reasons. One is, indeed, incompetence. It has been studied and measured that people who are incompetent are incapable of measuring their level of incompetence and consistently overestimate their ability. The
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology had an article on it,
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments:
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
On the flip side, people who are competent consistently underestimate their ability. People who know a great deal about a subject are more likely to understand that the subject is greater than any one person can fully comprehend and thus will hedge their analyses.
Willful dismissal of expert opinion is, no doubt, related to this inability to recognize one's own incompetence: Because you don't realize just how out of touch you are, you are incapable of considering the possibility that you are not in a position to effectively respond. You overestimate your ability and thus find no reason to hesitate when contradicting somebody with greater experience and more extensive background.
Another, more powerful effect, however, probably comes from cognitive dissonance. If you have a fundamental outlook of how the world is supposed to behave, encountering information that contradicts it is "traumatic." Thus, the information is denied in favor of the core belief.
Combine these two together and you have a powerful block to information: If it contradicts your deeply help opinions of the world and you are incompetent to analyse the information, we should not be surprised that you dismiss it.
Rrhain
Thank you for your submission to
Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.
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