In light of our discussion on political advertising and its truthfulness, I ran into this very timely article in Salon today by a Dr. Robert Burton, former head of medicine at Mt. Zion-UCSF Hospital and the author of “On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not.”
Dr. Burton succinctly makes the point that people are very bad at letting facts influence their decision making process. One of the better example that he gives is from a 1999 study completed at Cornell bleakly entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” In that study, undergraduates were asked to rank their projected performance before taking excerpts from the LSAT (Boo.)
Not surprisingly, people tended to overestimate their performance. Most interesting perhaps was that those that did the worst predicted their performance was going to be the best. As a corollary, those that did the best tended to overestimate the performance of other, assuming that those at the bottom really understood what was going on. The quotes that Dr. Burton provides from that study should send shivers up the spine of all and singular:
“People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else’s.”
The question this suggests is if we – as a species – are prone to think we get it, is democracy and the process of making laws just a crap shoot? Do we just piss in the wind based on our perception of facts and sometimes get it right, and sometimes die in a hail of bullets? Is the faith that some among our loyal readers place in the American people, the misplaced optimism of the smart?
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3 Responses to Dr. Burton Sums it Up.
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Interesting article. Good find. His point is taken – it would be better to have a better idea of how candidates make decisions – but his proposal would never work in practice. A few related and sort of related thoughts…
First, If we did what Burton recommends, a candidate would spend all his time justifying by the scientific method why he believes anything he believes (note Burton expects the candidate to scientifically justify all beliefs held for “non-scientific reasons” including, presumably, those unrelated to governing the nation or carrying out the duties of office). Only very few think like that and even those that do, I am assuming, don’t always get it right and may rule out non-measurable qualities and factors when making decisions and forming opinions.
Second, I think there’s wisdom in the idea that while individuals may deceive themselves, taken as a group, the electorate would tend to be more correct than any one person could be. And there’s a certain arrogance to the idea that man can reason his way out of everything and prove everything by the scientific method. (Though, again, I agree that reason and science ought to be central.) You can’t just assume that an elite few who really do get it know better than everyone else who have every right to choose their own leaders even if they do it poorly.
Third, there’s also interesting research that having too much information is bad. Expecting every single voter to perform the scientific method to make decisions puts a lot of information before people who actually make better decisions based on instinct and feel. See, for instance, Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, which posits that rapid cognition – the thinking that goes on in the first 2 seconds after being presented with a choice – can be better and more rational than thinking done after presented with all the facts.
If I agreed that people vote for candidates for office base don their policies, I’d have the same concern you do, Dr. B. But they don’t. And they shouldn’t.
There is no possible way for a candidate for office to be able to clearly articulate a logical, fact based decision on any issue that may come up while they are in office. It would be stupid and a waste of time to base our decisions on a bunch of hypotheticals. Fortunately, that’s not what the majority of people do.
When you vote for a candidate, you are generally voting for who you think will do the best job in office. Personally, I am willing to give candidates a pass if they don’t have exactly the same ideology as I do, or if they have made mistakes in the pass if I believe that, overall, they have good judgment and can be trusted to make the right decisions. I think this is how most people base their decision to vote.
I know that most of what the candidates promise is unlikely to happen. Obama can’t waive a magic wand and raise or lower taxes. He can’t create a national health care system overnight. McCain can’t reform Washington in two hours. These guys are constrained by the structure of the office and by the checks and balances in our system of government.
At the end of the day, we should be voting for the person we have the most confidence in. If we trust their judgment, we should be willing to live with the consequences of their decisions. If we don’t, no amount of pandering, class warfare, or bogus campaign ads should convince us otherwise.
Well everyone knows that politics is just a media-dictated popularity contest anyway.
My concern after reading the article is how this plays out in juries.