The Reverse Dunning Kruger Effect

If smart people in the faculty lounges are smart, why are they so stupid?

At Townhall, Matt Vespa writes:

“Earlier this month, The Washington Post’s Dan Balz detailed in short order the structural issues facing the Democratic Party. It’s nothing you haven’t heard before, but with the return of Donald J. Trump to the White House, these can’t be dismissed as a one-off thing. Democrats struggle with working class voters and those without college educations.”

OK, Dan. Tell us something we don’t know.

The Democrats love to crow about how they win the “smart” classes, those higher in educational credentials – how they capture the laptop class, the college educated white suburban wine moms (the AWFLs), the bureaucratic classes, and have a stranglehold on the faculty lounge lizards in academia.

So why is it that these “smart” people believe and support things that are so obviously wrong? In other words, if smart people are smart, why aren’t they smart?

It sure seems to me that the more educated people are, the more divorced they are from reality and begin to equate unnecessary or invented complexity with intelligence and sophistication. If you have ever tried to read an academic paper on CRT, Queer Theory, or gender dysphoria, you will get a taste of it – these papers are filled with academic gobbledygook that has been invented specifically for each of these areas of “study” and are as indecipherable as the Voynich Manuscript.

Higher education is generally associated with better critical thinking and reasoning skills, but it can also make people more susceptible to biases. Highly educated individuals are often better at rationalizing their beliefs, using their intelligence to justify errors rather than correct them. Academic and professional environments can create echo chambers where widely accepted beliefs go unchallenged, and the need to fit in can override skepticism. Additionally, deep knowledge in one field can lead to blind spots in others, causing experts to assume their expertise extends beyond their domain.

There seems to be something like a Reverse Dunning-Kruger Effect in play. The DK effect usually describes low-competence people overestimating their abilities, but highly competent people can suffer from false consensus bias—believing their expertise makes them more right than they actually are, even in areas outside their expertise.

Furthermore, educated individuals tend to trust "official" sources, which can make them less critical of misinformation coming from authoritative institutions. A deep understanding of some topics can also create a false sense of certainty, leading people to stop questioning their foundational assumptions.

The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated how even highly educated people could believe things that later proved false. COVID quickly left the realm of science and became political, and beliefs about masks, lockdowns, and vaccines aligned with ideological identities, making critical debate difficult. It was true that scientists and policymakers were dealing with a new virus, leading to shifting guidelines but many trusted early statements that were later overturned. Allegedly educated individuals placed too much faith in organizations like the CDC and WHO, organizations that issued early mask and “social distancing” guidance, dismissed airborne transmission, and and vehemently dismissed the lab leak possibility.

The pandemic triggered fear – coupled with massive political pressure, leading even educated people to conform to mainstream narratives without questioning them. Alternative viewpoints were labeled as misinformation and suppressed, making it difficult for people to consider a broader range of evidence. Many also assumed that scientists had definitive answers early on when they were still figuring things out – and none of these classes wanted to say “We don’t know” or “We are still looking into it” because that would make them seem less important than they assume themselves to be.

Knowledge is power, and apparently even fake knowledge is power.

While more education doesn’t necessarily equate to being more gullible, it does seem to make smart people too trusting of institutions and far too confident in the prevailing consensus. True intelligence requires skepticism, humility, a willingness to challenge even widely accepted beliefs - and an attachment to reality - and that’s why we rubes tend to see through these sham pronouncements of the allegedly smart people classes.