OK, I know “stupid” is a bit harsh, and yes I know that a lot of economic and social issues played into support for Trump, BUT I think there really is something more here, something that goes right to the heart of the malaise we see in public discussion.
What brought it home to me was reviewing this fascinating (yet depressing) article on Bloomberg — www.bloomberg.com/… . It seems that for these 8 Trump voters at least, he is still doing a great job. After the deluge of stupid things that Trump did before and after the election, the question is why do people still see him as at least somewhat competent?
I think the problem is the “Dunning-Kruger effect”. The what effect? This is the effect that seems to be possessed by many in society today — the illusion of competence. This is spelled out very clearly in an article at aeon.co/…
Interestingly, students who scored the lowest in these cognitive tasks always overestimated how well they did – by a lot. Students who scored in the bottom quartile estimated that they had performed better than two-thirds of the other students!
Think about this in terms of how people feel about their knowledge on health care, or immigration, or … virtually any current topic. With the mass coverage on the media these days it is not hard for people to “think” they have a good idea about what is involved. But do they really? Probably for many fellow citizens it is not likely, although they may have other ideas.
The problem is that when people are incompetent, not only do they reach wrong conclusions and make unfortunate choices but, also, they are robbed of the ability to realise their mistakes. In a semester-long study of college students, good students could better predict their performance on future exams given feedback about their scores and relative percentile. However, the poorest performers showed no recognition, despite clear and repeated feedback that they were doing badly. Instead of being confused, perplexed or thoughtful about their erroneous ways, incompetent people insist that their ways are correct. As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man (1871): ‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’
So we have Trump not knowing that he doesn’t know something, and really not knowing what it is like to actually know something, and we still have a large percentage of Americans not catching on (and overestimating how well they understand the current issues). And so Trump’s rating continue to hover at 38% favorable, no matter what new scandal or screw up comes out.