Doesn't quite add up. If the "political facts" they grilled and evaluated participants on revolved around knowledge of precise information about the structure of government, how it operates, existing statutes, and facts about individual legislators and their stances on policy issues... Then how do you get complex or more difficult to determine "gray areas" from that (via being "more informed")? Answers to such would actually be of the very definitive or binary nature that they covertly disparage one group (conservatives) for desiring. Such "political facts" have little to do with the varying moral standards, self-interested commitment to one's own community or group, and socioeconomic goals of opposing ideologies that actually drive voter decision-making (as well as knowledge of the intellectual genealogies of parties and political movement histories -- concealed motives).
And why the surprise at moderates being insufficiently confident and potentially less involved in politics? Either that's due to information overkill from multiple POVs again creating that celebrated "gray area" which entails diminishing the ability to decide or to act speedily (including sometimes letting any diesel truck that comes along roar through unimpeded due to that hesitancy), or... When has genuine neutrality or indifference ever generated passion and high expertise in _X_ area, unless one is placed in a job or enters a situation that requires attention devoted to _X_?
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People with the least political knowledge tend to be the most overconfident in their grasp of facts
https://www.psypost.org/people-with-the-...f-facts/hh
EXCERPTS: New research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Appliedhh suggests that people often overestimate their understanding of political facts. This tendency to be overconfident appears most common among individuals who actually know the least about politics and those who lean conservative...
[...] As the researchers explained, “Metacognition is broadly defined as thinking about one’s own cognition. The type we studied is called metacognitive monitoring accuracy, or the degree to which judgments of what one knows matches what one actually knows.”
In simpler terms, this concept refers to a person’s ability to accurately recognize when they are right and when they are wrong. “People tend to be overconfident regarding what they think they know, and this has serious consequences in the political realm, such as when people vote on candidates and issues that they don’t understand as well as they think they do,” the researchers stated.
[...] To evaluate political awareness, the participants took a test of 60 questions covering basic political figures, government rules, and policy issues. The test was designed to be balanced, containing an equal number of questions that might favor liberal or conservative viewpoints. It also included 20 general knowledge questions to serve as a point of comparison.
The researchers measured confidence at two different points during the testing process. First, participants were asked to estimate how well they would do on the test before they took it. Then, after answering the multiple-choice questions, they rated their confidence in each specific answer they had just selected. [...] The scientists also used an objective questionnaire to measure the participants’ political orientation based on their agreement with specific policies, rather than just asking them to label themselves.
A person with a high need for cognitive closure generally prefers a clear “yes” or “no” answer and dislikes gray areas. By collecting all this information, the researchers could look at how political beliefs and thinking habits relate to self-awareness. The researchers observed that the participants were generally overconfident in their test performance. The gap between what people thought they knew and what they actually knew was widest among those with the lowest test scores.
“We found that people are generally overconfident in their political knowledge, especially those who truly don’t know much about politics (the classic Dunning-Kruger effect),” the researchers detailed. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge in a specific area greatly overestimate their own competence, often because they lack the expertise needed to recognize their own mistakes.
The data also revealed a connection between political leanings, thinking styles, and this overconfidence. “Those who were more politically conservative and who like to make quick, definitive decisions, even if they may not have all the relevant information, tend to be the most overconfident,” the researchers observed.
To explain this, the scientists point to the mental shortcuts, or cues, that people use to judge their own memory. “Our analyses suggest that these individuals may be using the wrong cues to decide whether they know something or not,” the researchers stated. For instance, someone might mistakenly rely on a strong political identity as a cue that they know a specific political fact, rather than actually retrieving the correct information from memory.
[...] The researchers caution against generalizing too broadly from this single investigation. “Keep in mind that this is just one study and it needs to be replicated and extended in order to draw strong conclusions,” the researchers added.
The analysis also brought a couple of unexpected trends to light. “We were surprised that political metacognition was better than general knowledge metacognition, and that underconfidence was most prevalent among political moderates,” the researchers noted. “The first was reassuring but the latter suggests that political moderates may be insufficiently engaged and/or vocal in the political realm.”
The scientists emphasized that their goal is not to criticize any specific group of voters. “We do not at all intend to shame or pass judgment on anyone, it isn’t easy to be metacognitively accurate and there are lots of factors that can bias us,” the researchers said.
They also pointed out that the findings do not apply universally to all conservatives. “It’s also not an anti-conservative paper; we emphasize that at high levels of political knowledge, liberals and conservatives had very similar political metacognitive accuracy,” the researchers stated.
In fact, the data suggests that actual familiarity with a topic overrides political biases. As the researchers put it, “political metacognitive accuracy was better predicted by political knowledge than political orientation, meaning that what one knows is more important than whether one leans liberal or conservative.”
“We also want to emphasize that when we say ‘political knowledge’ we mean verifiable political facts, like who the speaker of the house is or how many votes are needed to pass a bill,” the researchers clarified. “So, we were not presenting highly emotional or biased information for our participants to judge, and thus our results might not replicate in more politicized contexts.”
Because the participants were mostly White, male, and lower-to-middle income, the scientists caution that the findings might not apply to the entire American population. The researchers are already planning to expand this line of inquiry to address these variables and explore new contexts... (MORE - missing details)
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