New research indicates that the Dunning-Kruger effect — meaning the tendency for less competent individuals to overestimate their competence — can be applied to prejudicial attitudes. The study, which appears in Personality and Individual Differences, found that the least egalitarian individuals tended to be those who overestimated their levels of egalitarianism the most.
“I’m generally interested in how prejudice works and in why it’s sometimes difficult to get people to become less prejudiced. This study opened a window into understanding why some people don’t know that they’re prejudiced, and why those people might be particularly difficult to reach,” said study author Keon West, an associate professor of social psychology and the director of Equalab at Goldsmiths, University of London.
The researchers examined who was the most likely to overestimate their level of egalitarianism in two studies with 307 participants.
Participants were asked to report how egalitarian they believed they were in regards to race (in the first study) or gender (in the second study) compared to the other people. They then stated their favorability towards Black people or women in the workplace. The participants also completed Implicit Association Tests (IATs), which measured implicit biases related to race or gender.
The researchers found that those who reported feeling the most unfavorable toward Black people and displayed the most implicit bias toward Black people were also the ones who most strongly overestimated their racial egalitarianism. Similarly, those who reported feeling the most unfavorable toward women in the workplace and displayed the most implicit bias toward women were also the ones who most strongly overestimated their gender-based egalitarianism.
“You don’t know how prejudiced you are. The most egalitarian people in any given group (i.e., the least prejudiced) tend to think of themselves as above-average (or less prejudiced than the average person in the group),” West told PsyPost.
“But unfortunately, the least egalitarian people in the group also think they’re above average. In other words, even the most prejudiced people tend to think that they are less prejudiced than the average. Do you think you’re less prejudiced than the average person? Probably. But that tells you nothing about where you actually stand.”
“The only way to know is some external or objective measure. Do a few IATs or let an independent party look for measurable signs of prejudiced or egalitarian behaviour. If you don’t do that, you’ll never know,” West said.
Similar research has found that people who perform the worst on a political quiz are the most likely to overestimate their political knowledge. People who strongly endorse misinformation about the link between autism and vaccines, meanwhile, are the most likely to believe that they know as much or more than medical doctors about the causes of autism.
The new research provides evidence that the Dunning-Kruger effect occurs for prejudicial attitudes as well. But it is still unclear why prejudiced people are more likely to misjudge their own prejudice.
“We don’t yet know why this effect occurs. Though we do have a few educated guesses based on similar work in other areas. People who overestimate themselves (i.e., think they’re less prejudiced than they are) probably have very simplistic ideas of what prejudice means (e.g., restricted only to the most obvious and aggressive types) or overestimate how prejudiced other people are. We don’t know, but it’s a good place to start,” West explained.
“Many lay people don’t know that there’s a large and expertly established body of scientific evidence about prejudice. There’s a tendency to reduce it to feelings or opinions about personal lived experience. If you’re one of those people, you’re doing yourself a disservice. There are many things that we know, scientifically, about prejudice. Learning those things, and understanding how we’ve come to know them, is a good first step.”
The study, “Prejudiced and unaware of it: Evidence for the Dunning-Kruger model in the domains of racism and sexism“, was authored by Keon West and Asia A. Eaton.
(Photo credit: Stephen Melkisethian)
