How to converse with know-it-alls
What does flushing the toilet have to do with reducing political extremism? This isn’t a weird joke. There’s a bizarre connection here, studied by behavioral researchers. It relates understanding our ignorance to moderating extreme views.By way of entry, you have probably heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon of incompetence that’s too incompetent to recognize itself. When people have very little exposure to a subject, their confidence in their own opinions about it becomes dramatically inflated. If, for example, a plane crashes in controversial circumstances, many people on Twitter magically become aeronautical engineers and air-traffic control 'experts' in about five minutes.
