Do American Citizens Know What They Don't Know?

• In Event: Knowledge, Misperceptions, and Conspiracies

Abstract

While a vast literature focuses on citizens’ level of accuracy in recalling key political facts (Barabas et al. 2014), few studies have examined citizens’ level of confidence in their own political knowledge. Using an experiment embedded in a survey of 700 American citizens, we investigate a) whether self-assessments of political knowledge change after completing a political knowledge battery and b) who is likely to adjust. We experimentally manipulate the placement of a 10-item political knowledge battery. In a first experimental condition, we asked respondents to assess their own political knowledge before answering the 10-item battery. In a second experimental condition, respondents assessed their knowledge after answering the 10-item battery. This design allows us to examine whether completion of the 10-item battery causes self-reflection that results in changes in citizens’ attitudes toward their own knowledge.

Our results indicate that the completion of the 10-item battery causes respondents to be more modest when assessing their knowledge. Respondents who were randomly assigned to evaluate their own knowledge after completing the 10-item battery demonstrated diminished confidence in their knowledge compared to respondents who were randomly assigned to the alternative condition. This is, in a way, good news from an epistemic conception of democracy: citizens appear able to engage in self-reflective behavior after engagement with politics. However, we also find meaningful heterogeneity in treatment effects. Most notably, while completion of the 10-item battery causes moderately knowledgeable Americans to adjust their self-assessments downward, low knowledge citizens remain fairly confident even after doing poorly on the political knowledge battery. Indeed, we find no evidence that the politically ignorant are swayed by their poor performance on the 10-item battery, which lends support to the idea that they are unaware of their own incompetence (Kruger and Dunning 1999). This highlights a perverse dilemma of democratic politics: those who most need to learn are persuaded that they already know a lot – even after completing a task that should have plainly shown their incompetence.

Authors

• Olivier Bergeron-Boutin, McGill University

• Philippe Chassé, Université de Montréal