What percent of Americans are Muslims? How much of America’s wealth is owned by the bottom 70 per cent of the population? Has the murder rate in the U.S. increased since 2000?
Responses to such questions shape views on public policy, yet Americans’ answers are often far off the mark. On average, Americans believe 17 percent of the population is Muslim; the actual figure is one percent. They believe the bottom 70 percent own 28 percent of America’s wealth; it’s 7 percent. The murder rate has declined 11 percent since 2000, but 52 per cent of Americans believe it has gone up.
As another example, only three percent of Americans know that less than one percent of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid; on average people think it’s 31 percent. On many issues, Americans just don’t know. That’s understandable. No one can pay attention to all these things. What’s troubling, though, is when we won’t admit we don’t know. The Dunning-Kruger effect suggests people are often quite confident when they are quite mistaken. As the authors of this research put it: “Not only do [people] reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” During the French Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne reflected on this: “the plague of man is boasting of his knowledge.”
Asked in 2019 if a universal basic income of $1,000 per month for everyone 18 or older is a good or bad idea, only 8% said they were unsure. It’s probably safe to assume, however, that the other 92% could not answer such key questions as: Where would the money come from? How would such a program be administered? How would it impact the incentive to work? Clearly, lack of expertise does not mean lack of opinions.
The first step against understandable ignorance is admitting it. When asked a question where we have no factual knowledge or when polled on a topic with which we’re unfamiliar, we should just say “I don’t know.” For many, however, that’s a bridge too far. Why?
Americans are more educated and, with the Internet, have access to more factual knowledge than ever. Yet, this can make us less willing to admit our ignorance. It’s embarrassing to say “I don’t know” when everyone around you is so sure because, as they claim “I’ve done the research.” We’re also more reluctant to say “I don’t know” because we have also “done the research,” though often this amounts to reading Internet material that has weak or no vetting for accuracy or just finding evidence to back up what we already believe. The tendency to join homogeneous social groups that, aided by social media, feed us what we want to hear removes the need to challenge what we “know.”
As Tom Nichols argues in The Death of Expertise, Americans don’t like to be challenged, the result of a cultural belief in equality. As he puts it: “Americans now believe that having equal rights in a political system also means that each person’s opinion about anything must be accepted as equal to anyone else’s.” Thus, there’s no need to say “I don’t know.” The response when confronted by someone who probably does know, based on true expertise, is that “you’re entitled to your opinion and I’m entitled to mine.”
This intellectual egalitarianism also reflects Americans’ love-hate relationship with experts. Our social climate supports distrust of elites, intellectuals, and academics. Science, the source of so much progress, is too often looked on as inaccessible, dangerous, or just the opinion of university researchers who don’t live in the “real world.”
Nichols also faults our education system, especially higher education, for our inflated sense of knowledge. Years of catering to students as if they are customers not pupils, refusing to demand more intellectual rigor and inflating grades, he maintains, has left young adults with the belief they are a lot smarter than they are.
What we think we know (and failing to acknowledge when we don’t) is also shaped by politics. In the case of COVID19, partisans often “know” different “facts.” Openly questioning what we “know” about masks, social distancing, and the efficacy of certain drugs is an invitation to ostracism from one’s political friends, who are often one’s social group too.
The solution is intellectual humility. Research by Elizabeth Krumrei-Mancuso and her colleagues suggests that people who score higher on this trait are less likely to exaggerate what they know, more likely to be intellectually curious, more open to finding new evidence and changing their views, and have less need to come to closure, which chokes off the search for knowledge.
“I don’t know” is an invitation to learning, conversation and reasoned debate – and to encouraging others to admit when they don’t know. Thomas Jefferson once remarked, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Saying “I don’t know” is healthy for all of us.
Photo Credit: Jon Tyson @ unsplash.com
