The internet, from its humble beginnings, was often referred to as the greatest teaching and learning tool ever invented. It was genuinely believed that giving us unlimited information, instant global communication and open access to knowledge, with searchable archives and free educational resources would create a new era in human learning.
Then pictures of cats appeared and suddenly it became the greatest distraction ever invented.
The promise was real, the outcome? kinda mixed. The potential is still there, hiding . . . among the average people. George Carlin said, “Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
You can spend a decade at higher learning institutions, write hundreds of papers, be told by experts that you’re an expert and even stroll off to investigate even more interesting fields, and one of the masses is still going to call you stupid.
However, not every person who calls someone smarter than them stupid is stupid. They’re just rude.
Read on.
Did you know that social psychologists have studied this phenomenon. Many of you have heard of this “effect” but first let’s find out what they discovered in studying people.
- People with very low skill in a domain often cannot detect that someone else is more skilled. This doesn’t immediately cause hostility, though if the two should debate the issue, the odds that one will attack ad hominem are great. It starts out as a perceptual limitation and then becomes a shouting match.
- People who perform poorly tend to overestimate their own ability and underestimate experts.
- Sociologists have repeatedly found that some groups with low educational attainment show distrust of scholars, viewing them as “out of touch,” “overcomplicating things,” or “missing the obvious.” This is found in the internet meme that states, people with degrees often lack common sense. Those posting that meme don’t realize that common sense doesn’t have a common definition, and means different things to different people.
- Cultural cognition studies have shown that when people lack the background to evaluate expert claims, they often rely on identity, emotion, or group loyalty, which can make scholars appear “wrong” or “stupid” simply because their conclusions feel unfamiliar.
None of these studies frame their subjects as “slow.” The issue is a lack of metacognitive skills, a term which simply means being aware of ones own thinking; like stepping outside of yourself and evaluating your thinking, your mental processes.
Most all of us operate on automatic cognition. Instead of actually thinking, we rely on habits, impulses, emotional reactions, and social cues. Our brains are conserving energy. We don’t use metacognition, which is a high effort skill, until we are forced to use it. It’s not taught in schools, employers don’t reward it, and culture (the internet) doesn’t encourage it. Then there’s fear (political, social, economic) that shuts it down entirely.
Fascism
A fascinating subject that has been studied by historians, political scientists, and human-rights scholars.
Fascism doesn’t come about overnight, and not by revolution. We don’t wake up one morning and say to ourselves, “Boy, we sure could use a dictator!”
It all comes about slowly, cumulatively, through fear, division, and the erosion of shared reality.
Fear . . . that starts it off. A few years back, after my investigations, I designed this meme. Fear is what encompasses these steps.
Start with fear and point to them. It’s always “us against them.” They have to be feared.
“The tragedy of our day is the climate of fear in which we live, and fear breeds repression. Too often sinister threats to the Bill of Rights, to freedom of the mind, are concealed under the patriotic cloak of anticommunism.” Adlai Stevenson
Then truth becomes optional. We believe whatever our side says. And we must shut up the journalists, scientists, courts, etc etc etc.
Us against them . . . divide et impera: divide and conquer. This has been going on for centuries.
Then finally discredit the experts. (Note we are back on subject.) How easy this becomes when most people don’t think in the first place, remember? They rely on habits, impulses, emotional reactions, and social cues.
Politics exploits automatic thinking.
There’s an old joke: How do you start a fight on the internet?
Post something.
In today’s political climate, post something someone disagrees with and you’ve made an enemy. You can have an IQ nearing 200 and you will be called a moron.
Please Note: We have not said “uneducated people think educated people are stupid.”
Fear shuts down reflective thinking, disable metacognition, and puts people in survival mode. Survival mode stops people from questioning, analyzing, verifying, thinking ahead, noticing contradictions, and worst of all, recognizing manipulation. Fear make people react, not think.
And automatic thinking plus fear makes people vulnerable. And vulnerable people need certainty. Fear creates that certainty with black & white thinking, simple explanations, scapegoats, and loyalty to strong authority.
Dunning/Kruger
Their original study was called: “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self‑Assessments” by Justin Kruger & David Dunning (1999) Journal of Personality and Social Psychology https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10626367/
Here is what they found:
- People in the lower 25% group of “performance” grossly overestimated their abilities.
- Their lack of skill also meant they could not recognize the skill in others.
- This metacognitive deficit caused th Get it get it get it set You stay here I love you Thank you em to misjudge experts — not out of hostility, but because they literally lacked the ability to evaluate expertise.
And it’s summed up thus: people who don’t know much don’t know how much they don’t know.
Take science. There are people labeled “science deniers.” A study called, “Motivated Rejection of Science” Dan M. Kahan, Ellen Peters, Maggie Wittlin, Paul Slovic, et al. Journal of Risk Research (2012) looked at those people.
This study shows that people with low science literacy and low numeracy often judge scientific experts as wrong, confused, or “stupid”, not because of hostility but because they lack the cognitive tools to evaluate expert claims.
This is the study most often cited when discussing why low‑knowledge individuals misjudge scholars. Or as we said in the beginning, “being called an idiot on Twitter.”
Kahan and colleagues found:
- People with low domain knowledge often cannot distinguish between valid expert reasoning and flawed reasoning.
- When expert conclusions contradict their intuition, they interpret the expert as incompetent.
- This misjudgment is strongest among individuals with low metacognitive ability (the ability to evaluate one’s own understanding).
- The effect is not about intelligence as a trait, it’s about lack of cognitive tools needed to evaluate expertise.
Psychologists point to epistemic humility as a cure for all that’s wrong above. An awareness that what we know is limited and that expertise matters. This is the antidote to the Dunning-Kruger effect and to anti-intellectualism.
As a scientist, teacher, journalist, this subject has always fascinated me. And studies in the social sciences too have a certain fascination. I’ve always said if you want to understand human behavior, there are three studies you must learn about:
- The Milgram Experiment, “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” (1963, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology). There are movies made on this one.
- The Asch Conformity Experiments, conducted by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. This one shows how peer pressure affects us as individuals.
- They Saw a Game (1954), showing how perception bends under identity.
Together, these studies explain how ordinary people behave in groups, under pressure, and inside polarized societies. They’re not obscure academic trivia. They’re a map of human vulnerability.
Then add to the above three studies, the following:
- Dunning–Kruger effect — low performers cannot recognize their own incompetence or competence in others.
- “Science Curiosity and Political Information Processing” (Kahan, 2017) — low‑knowledge individuals misinterpret expert claims.
- “The Nature of Anti‑Intellectualism” (Rigney, 1991) — sociological evidence that low‑education groups often distrust scholars and label them as “out of touch.”
And now you can see why you’re called an idiot, but most of all how the social sciences provide a powerful explanation for how populations become vulnerable to authoritarian movements.
Authoritarianism doesn’t succeed because people are stupid.
It succeeds because human psychology is predictable.
And you’re still an idiot.
Sadly, so am I.
