- Selective memory/political amnesia
- Cognitive dissonance
- Confirmation bias
Not really a recipe for a way to “progress”, is it?
Also in evidence, the Dunning-Kruger Effect:
Developed by psychologists and researchers Justin Kruger and David Dunning, the aptly named Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence is of such as scale that it eliminates the ability for them to realize their own mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from an illusion of superiority, rating their ability as above average, far higher than it actually is. It also explains why, in the face of clear evidence that their decisions are wrong, they plod ahead while proclaiming their superiority. A common statement when challenged is, “I can’t explain it to you because you just wouldn’t understand”, and the implication is that you just aren’t smart enough to challenge them. People exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger effect are often highly self-confident, some to the point of boorish behavior, and often exhibit an “absolutist” attitude toward their actions…even in the face of clear failure.
The converse action is that while the unskilled overrate their abilities, the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. In this illusion of inferiority, actual competence may weaken self-confidence. Even highly competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding and because of force of will or positions of power, they subjugate their correct choices to the incorrect. The error in calibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others. This cognitive error leads to thought processes that support elitism, i.e. “that guy went to Harvard Law, he must be smarter than I am”, when the actual case is just the opposi
All of us have seen it and similar, less scientifically based notions have been expressed since time immemorial. Dunning and Kruger themselves quote Charles Darwin, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” and Bertrand Russell (a British philosopher, logician, essayist and social critic best known for his work in mathematical logic and analytic philosophy), “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” W.B. Yeats put it concisely thus: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
The Dunning–Kruger effect is not narrowly constrained to high-order cognitive skills, much less their application in the political realm during a particular era (what Russell was talking about), nor is it specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it (which the Darwin quote implies).Dunning and Kruger cite a study where it was found that 94% of college professors rank their work as “above average” relative to their peers, underscoring that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt.Anyone who understands how to take an average knows that there is no possibility that 94% of the numbers can be above the average.
A good portion of the above was taken from Wikipedia but you can find more about the Dunning-Kruger Effect at Psychology Today.