Make People Feel Ignorant So They Listen To Experts

Argument analysis flowchart
Figure 1 from Cook, Ellerton, and Kinkead 2018. CC BY 3.0

The rise of disinformation by organizations big and small means the role of experts is even more important. We have seen how people have been manipulated around elections to vote against their interests and even to deny a well-documented global pandemic. The notion that people deny reality isn’t new, we’ve seen it with climate change. So how do we address this knowledge problem?
Making people realize that they don’t know everything is the solution. People are more receptive to the knowledge of experts when they themselves realize they don’t know everything – and opinions aren’t knowledge.

While they usually should, people do not revise their beliefs more to expert (economist) opinion than to lay opinion. The present research sought to better understand the factors that make it more likely for an individual to change their mind when faced with the opinions of expert economists versus the general public. Across five studies we examined the role that overestimation of knowledge plays in this behavior. We replicated the finding that people fail to privilege the opinion of experts over the public across two different (Study 1) and five different (Study 5) economic issues. We further find that undermining an illusion of both topic-relevant (Studies 2–4) and -irrelevant knowledge (Studies 3 and 4) leads to greater normative belief revision in response to expert rather than lay opinion. We suggest one reason that people fail to revise their beliefs more in response to experts is because people think they know more than they really do.

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