October 23, 2018

A new study finds that people who are convinced of their superior knowledge about some subject – political issues, economic matters, societal trends, for example – actually have less real knowledge than they think: There’s a gap between their perceived and actual knowledge.

The research, from the University of Michigan and described in this summary, looked at how well those people were informed on the topics about which they held superiority beliefs. Across five studies the researchers found that those people with the highest belief superiority also tended to have the largest gap between their perceived and actual knowledge. They maintained the illusion that they were better informed than they were. In fact, those with the lowest belief superiority tended to underestimate how much they knew.

Or, as the researchers put it in more academic language, “Belief superiority is unassociated with true knowledge of many political issues.”

The researchers also looked at whether people with belief superiority sought out new information relevant to that belief. They found that those with higher belief-superiority were more likely to select information congruent with their belief. That is, despite being badly informed compared to their self-perception, they chose to neglect sources of information that would enhance their knowledge.

One encouraging finding: If they were told that people with beliefs like theirs tended to score poorly on topic knowledge, or if they were directly told that their score on the topic knowledge quiz was low, this tended to reduce their belief superiority, That’s hopeful!

The study was published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Credit: CPD Archive