Tag: dunning-kruger

Ratfucking 2010 style

Dave Weigel lays it out:

One of the more jarring passages in Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” is his recounting of a popular myth that went around Iowa in 1966, the year of the conservative backlash against the Great Society. The myth was that black gang members on motorcycles were going to head from Chicago to ransack Des Moines. Reading this in 2008, it sounded preposterous, the kind of thing that no one could believe in the country that was about to elect Barack Obama. But [Fox’s Megyn] Kelly, under the guise of journalism, is working to create a rumor like this in 2010. Watch her broadcasts and you become convinced that the New Black Panthers are a powerful group that hate white people and operate under the protection of Eric Holder’s DOJ. That “Megyn Kelly DESTROYS Kirsten Powers” video that I mentioned begins with her introducing a clip of a town hall meeting with Rep. Brad Sherman (D-Ca.) in which he gets an angry question about whether the DOJ has a policy of not prosecuting African-Americans.

“I am extremely sure that we do not have a policy at the Department of Justice of never prosecuting a black defendent.”

The crowd rises up. “Yes you do!” shouts one voter. When Sherman says he doesn’t know much about the Panther case, the crowd erupts in boos. They’ve been driven to fear and distrust of their DOJ by round-the-clock videos of one racist idiot brandishing a nightstick for a couple hours in 2008.

The facts do not matter. This is precisely why people like Mr. Frazee are critically under-informed; it’s not so much that they don’t pay attention, it’s that if they are paying attention, it’s most likely they are watching FOXnews. Furthermore, anyone that grew up in the age of Cronkite has an implicit trust of television news: they simply must be making at least some effort to give us factual information…sure, it’s hyped here and there, but it must be all basically true. That’s just how it works.

And, in classic Dunning-Kruger fashion, they have no way of testing that hypothesis, are assured of their facts, and contrary, accurate information will only cause them dismay and harden their attachment to the preexisting falsity.

Four Things

The way I see it, this graph boils down to four things:

  1. Perceived level of understanding is a dangerous thing. But then, we knew this.
  2. Self-identifying independents of 1993 were largely moderates. Today, they are (apparently) the far right that finds the GOP not-quite-lunatic-enough and (probably) some fraction of former GOPers who are horrified by that party today. A “voted-X in last election” cross-tab would’ve helped here. A lot.
  3. The epistemic loop seems entirely responsible for the shift in initial wrong-ness, and misperception among Democrats that also has to be corrected through painstakingly slow re-education and gradual convincing. Lots of Democrats were buying into the Death Panels horse-shit too, after all, they heard it on the news, so the news-givers must be making at least a casual effort at factual correctness instead of merely reporting what various “sides” said. Right? Right? It is a mortal lock that these Democrats are older, and came of age with Walter Cronkite. They implicitly trust what they hear on TV, even if it’s on FOXnews. You can (eventually) convince them otherwise, but only with a lot of work; and research shows they still marginally believe the wrong fact if it comes first, even when said people realize the initial fact is misinformation. This is why primacy in the race to inoculation in the messaging war matters so goddamned much, and yet the Democrat categorically refuses to use it.
    Nearly 80% of Republicans self-identifying as “not knowing much” about healthcare reform knew that there were going to be Death Panels. More than 80% who “knew a lot” thought that as well. This is FOXnews, Rush, Beck, and Drudge (aka the MSM’s assignment editor). No other explanation for it.
  4. The Facts Do Not Matter

Full report (PDF link) here.