Interesting findings from a research on democracy
US: Is this the reason democracy can't work? Study find humans are
too dumb to pick the right person to lead us
It's a study that would have been music to the ears of Hitler, Stalin
and the rest of the 20th century's brutal dictators. But it may make
uncomfortable reading for the rest of us.
Scientists have suggested the theory of democracy has an unfortunate
flaw - that most of the public are just too stupid to pick the right
candidate.
According to the theory, the democratic process relies on the
assumption that a majority of citizens recognise the best political
candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it.
But a growing body of research has implied that democratic elections
produce mediocre leadership and policies.
Research led by Professor David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell
University, shows 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.
Prof Dunning said: 'Very smart ideas are going to be hard for people
to adopt, because most people don't have the sophistication to recognise
how good an idea is.'Research has suggested democratic elections give
people choice, but may not produce the best result in terms of the
quality of candidate electedHe and colleague Professor 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.
'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,' Prof Dunning said.
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,' Prof Dunning said.
Strangely though, in these experiments, people tend to readily and
accurately agree on who the worst performers are, while failing to
recognise the best performers.Truly ignorant people may be the worst
judges of candidates and ideas, Prof Dunning said, but we all suffer
from a degree of blindness stemming from our own personal lack of
expertise.Dr Mato Nagel, a sociologist in Germany, recently implemented
Prof Dunning and Prof 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 recognising 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.Dr 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.' Daily Mail |