On Using Dunning-Kruger to Explain Science Denial

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts,
while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

~ Charles Bukowski ~

Perhaps we've all encountered individuals who seem to be simultaneously overconfident and incompetent in a subject matter in which they have strong beliefs. When this occurs, many of us become convinced that these people are suffering from what has been popularly coined the "Dunning-Kruger Effect." I'd like to challenge this notion. I think this oversimplifies a complex problem we're experiencing today. We don't gain, learn and process information like we used to, and the information we see is frequently curated by our own biases and social media, and both can cause us to become ideologically entrenched in a condition in which we accept what is false and reject what challenges us.

The Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a Different Curve from
the Popularized Dunning-Kruger Effect

Dunning-Kruger Effect

The actual effect described by Dunning-Kruger (DKE) comes from a paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger and has to do with observations about how our confidence increases with competence. They tested people with various levels of experience/competence in a field and plotted both their self-perception of ability and their actual test scores by level of experience. They observed that both test scores and perceived ability increase with experience. However, the two have different slopes. Those with lower competence tend to over-estimate their performance while those with the greatest competence tend to under-estimate their performance. The two lines cross between the first and second quartile, suggesting that all but the most skilled in a subject tend to over-estimate their performance on tests of knowledge. This is what Dunning-Kruger wrote about, though to my knowledge they never called this an "effect."

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

In popular discussion, this effect has morphed into a generalized assessment of how people develop as they learn a new subject. In the popularized DKE (let's call this pDKE), students enthusiastically begin learning a subject, and they learn so much that they didn't know before that they quickly believe themselves to be very knowledgeable, but they lack an understanding of the complexities of the subject. As they develop competency, they begin to appreciate how large and complex the subject matter is and their confidence drops as their competency continues to grow. Eventually, as their competence grows into being "experts" in their field, their confidence may grow to a level near where it was when they were new to the field, but their confidence now is more well-grounded. Graphs of the pDKE are often labeled with terms like "Mount Stupid" or the "Valley of Despair."

In my view, this pDKE (without the labels) describes something that matches my own experience and my interactions with others. However, I don't think this is a valid way to view those entrenched in a state of being simultaneously overconfident and incompetent in a subject matter. First, while there are obvious conceptual parallels with the DKE, these pDKE graphs go well beyond what is described by Dunning & Kruger. And second (and more important), these pDKE charts show what I would consider the normal development of people learning any complex subject. To one degree or another, we go through a process similar to what is described above. As we begin to learn a subject we are taught what is basically and generally true, but we often are not taught exceptions to general rules, the complexities and nuances involved, and the like. So our confidence increases before we learn just how complex the subject is. We then learn the irregularities, nuances, and complexities that cause us to become more humble about our subject, and then we grow in confidence and competence from there. This is normal academic growth, but this is not the effect that we frequently encounter in debates in the public sphere.

Perpetual Sophomore Effect

We live in a world today in which various social media curate the information we receive, and this curation is trained on our own preferences, and therefore our own biases. This can create a selection bias that puts spotlight the kinds of information we are exposed to. If we only read and evaluate what we're exposed to on social media, we become overly familiar with a small subset of available information, and that subset may well contain a large fraction of false information, and that false information can become convincing when reinforced by repetition. This can generate a confirmation bias so strong that our growth and development in a particular subject can stagnate. But while our competency stagnates, our confidence continues to grow as we are exposed to more and more information that reinforces our beliefs. We can become entrenched in an endless feedback loop in which we see more and more information confirming our biases and nothing that challenges them. This can derail us from the normal development described in pDKE graphs; we essentially become perpetual sophomores (wise fools) in our chosen subject.

This is especially a problem when we become entrenched in patterns of curated information that reinforce conspiratorial or nonsensical ideas. Conspiratorial thinking results from connecting the dots between what we know with ideas that involve lies/fraud and coverups for which we don't have evidence. There are almost always more plausible ways to connect these dots that don't involve the conspiracy, but we aren't exposed to other ways these dots can be connected, and we don't critically evaluate the connections we made to see if they're correct. Essentially, we 1) rarely see corrections to our beliefs and biases, 2) immediately reject the corrections we do see, and 3) uncritically accept ideas that confirm what we already believe. This to me explains the rise in in conspiracy theories regarding climate change, vaccines, election fraud, and the like. And it also seems to explain why people who accept one of the above conspiracy theories are also more likely to accept others. Within this mindset, doing "research" in these areas inevitably becomes indistinguishable from reading up on what your favorite bloggers, YouTubers, political groups, and conspiracy theorists are saying. In today's world, it takes a fair amount of work to overcome this problem - we have to be actively critical of the information we see and also seek out broad sources of information in order learn different ways that dots can be connected that don't involve a conspiracy. This is what I'd like to call the "perpetual sophomore effect" (PSE).

In climate discussions, I frequently see people who are supremely confident in all sorts of concepts and ideas that run counter to basic physics, and frequently it becomes clear that they simply lack competence in scientific fields related to climate. Social media is filled with people claiming that the greenhouse effect is impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics, that further warming is impossible because CO2 is saturated in the atmosphere, that the planet is actually cooling despite what all GMST datasets are saying, etc. They may be very well-informed about these alternatives to sound scientific data and evidence, but they lack grounding in the physical sciences, so they lack the skills they need to see the flaws in the alternatives they are so confident in. 

At the same time, this dynamic also appears to occur among highly intelligent people who who are well trained in the physical sciences. We can point to several examples of prominent physicists who are highly respected in their own fields and yet when they consider the issue of climate change, they fall back on the same tired, contrarian talking points that have been debunked for decades. We can see examples of William Happer giving lectures saying that ECS is 0.7 K, despite massive amounts of evidence to the contrary, and we can even quote Happer essentially refuting his own arguments that ECS must be that low. John Clauser is a Nobel Laureate for work in quantum mechanics, but when he talks about climate, he reverts to somewhat ridiculous claims:

The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people. Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills. It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis.

But Clauser's alternative to climate science is fraught with problems, as has been documented on RealClimate. This suggests to me that what I'm calling the sophomore effect is not only driven by the curated confirmation biases that I described above. There may well be ideological (political, religious, etc.) and/or financial biases that trap us into the perpetual sophomore curve. So we can't conclude that people on the PSE curve are necessarily stupid or even inexperienced in the physical sciences. Happer and Clauser have the experience and knowledge they need to keep them from saying the "incompetent" things they say. But there appears to be something ideological keeping them on the PSE curve. This is another reason why I believe the Dunning-Kruger explanation is insufficient to explain the behavior we witness.

Conclusion

I don't know if the Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a good term; it's the best I've come up with so far. I don't want it to be pejorative, though I think whatever term I come up with will appear to be so. If you have any alternative names for this, feel free to suggest them in the comments. But I think we need to stop using Dunning-Kruger to describe those who are entrenched in being simultaneously overconfident and incompetent. This I believe is an analogous but different effect - it may look very similar early on, but the PSE prevents normal development from occurring. There's no path to gaining humility with experience while on the PSE curve. We have read broadly to expose ourselves to alternative ways evaluate claims and learn to turn a skeptical eye towards ourselves, reevaluate our own assessment of our knowledge, and jump off the cycles perpetually reinforcing our confirmation biases to get out of the Perpetual Sophomore Effect and back on to a normal pDKE curve.