People Aren't Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say

The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.


The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people's ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.


As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, "very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries.


He and colleague Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now of New York University, have demonstrated again and again that people are self-delusional when it comes to their own intellectual skills. Whether the researchers are testing people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess, the duo has found that people always assess their own performance as "above average" — even people who, when tested, actually perform at the very bottom of the pile. [Incompetent People Too Ignorant to Know It]


We're just as undiscerning about the skills of others as about ourselves. "To the extent that you are incompetent, you are a worse judge of incompetence in other people," Dunning said. In one study, the researchers asked students to grade quizzes that tested for grammar skill. "We found that students who had done worse on the test itself gave more inaccurate grades to other students." Essentially, they didn't recognize the correct answer even when they saw it.


The reason for this disconnect is simple: "If you have gaps in your knowledge in a given area, then you’re not in a position to assess your own gaps or the gaps of others," Dunning said. Strangely though, in these experiments, people tend to readily and accurately agree on who the worst performers are, while failing to recognize the best performers.
The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of expertise.


Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented Dunning and Kruger's theories by computer-simulating a democratic election. In his mathematical model of the election, he assumed that voters' own leadership skills were distributed on a bell curve — some were really good leaders, some, really bad, but most were mediocre — and that each voter was incapable of recognizing the leadership skills of a political candidate as being better than his or her own. When such an election was simulated, candidates whose leadership skills were only slightly better than average always won.


Nagel concluded that democracies rarely or never elect the best leaders. Their advantage over dictatorships or other forms of government is merely that they "effectively prevent lower-than-average candidates from becoming leaders."


http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/...democracy.html

Which is why the framers were smart enough to give us a Republic, not a democracy. They had studied and learned from the example of Athens.

Too bad we started throwing it away with the seventeenth amendment, and now have large numbers who want to finish the job by eliminating the electoral college.

..................and now have large numbers who want to finish the job by eliminating the electoral college. Originally Posted by Iaintliein

Large is a matter of personal perspective. Please define large?

There is a 1964 study done on this subject that had that very same conclusion. I have the book in storage and can not find it...

Any research done on this matter will lead you to that same conclusion.

We weed out the very bad, think Sara Palin but I contend our system is flawed for todays world.

What system would you prefer, WTF?

That was a pessimistic assessment, GP, but perhaps more true than we'd like to believe.

Humans used to live in caves, but we evolved out of there and went on to farms.

Then we evolved out of farms and went into towns and cities.

After that we seriously mucked things up by going to war and wrecking the world and then creating a Depression and wrecking the economy before going to war again!

You would think we don't learn the lessons of history unless we suffer the misery that we create and do it for endless cycles!

. . . Maybe humans just have to stumble along in the dark trying to find the way.

That is why our Founders did not establish a democracy, they established a constitutional republic. We have evolved into a democracy, which will eventually lead to tyranny. Once the people understand that they can vote themselves money out of the Treasury, which others have to refill, it's over. We are at that point.

When I look at the kind of candidates that are running for president today this scientific analysis / study starts looking more like truth to me. The people who voted these people into office (not to mention other elected officials across the country) says a lot about the kind of people who elected them. That is why I am a very strong supporter of good education. A good education all the way up to college is a necessity for a countries people.

That is why I am a very strong supporter of good education. A good education all the way up to college is a necessity for a countries people. Originally Posted by Guilty Pleasures

Education is evil, just ask Rick Santorum!

That fuc'er is going to have that around his neck forever like Gore and the internet!

Education isn't the answer, some of the worst gamers of the system are very well educated. No system works perfectly without perfect people, with perfect people, no system is necessary.

The checks and balances of our original Constitution helped minimize the problems, but greed is inherent in human nature. Now that we're so near the tipping point, when the majority take more out than they pay in, they'll keep voting for the socialists until the system collapses. When we go down there won't be anybody with deep enough pockets to bail us out, we're Greece in jumbo/economy size. . . "too big to fail" is bull shit, but something certainly can be "too big to rescue".