Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science, UMBC

As statewide primaries continue through the summer, many Americans are beginning to think about which candidates they will support in the 2022 general election.

This decision-making process is fraught with difficulties, especially for inexperienced voters.

Voters must navigate angry, emotion-laden conversations about politics when trying to sort out whom to vote for. Americans are more likely than ever to view politics in moral terms, meaning their political conversations sometimes feel like epic battles between good and evil.

But political conversations are also shaped by, obviously, what Americans know – and, less obviously, what they think they know – about politics.

In recent research, I studied how Americans’ perceptions of their own political knowledge shape their political attitudes. My results show that many Americans think they know much more about politics than they really do.

Knowledge deficit, confidence surplus

Over the past five years, I have studied the phenomenon of what I call “political overconfidence.” My work, in tandem with other researchers’ studies, reveals the ways it thwarts democratic politics.

Political overconfidence can make people more defensive of factually wrong beliefs about politics. It also causes Americans to underestimate the political skill of their peers. And those who believe themselves to be political experts often dismiss the guidance of real experts.

Political overconfidence also interacts with political partisanship, making partisans less willing to listen to peers across the aisle.

The result is a breakdown in the ability to learn from one another about political issues and events.

A ‘reality check’ experiment

In my most recent study on the subject, I tried to find out what would happen when politically overconfident people found out they were mistaken about political facts.

To do this, I recruited a sample of Americans to participate in a survey experiment via the Lucid recruitment platform. In the experiment, some respondents were shown a series of statements that taught them to avoid common political falsehoods. For instance, one statement explained that while many people believe that Social Security will soon run out of money, the reality is less dire than it seems.

My hypothesis was that most people would learn from the statements, and become more wary of repeating common political falsehoods. However, as I have found in my previous studies, a problem quickly emerged.

The problem

First, I asked respondents a series of basic questions about American politics. This quiz included topics like which party controls the House of Representatives – the Democrats – and who the current Secretary of Energy is – Jennifer Granholm. Then, I asked them how well they thought they did on the quiz.

Many respondents who believed they were top performers were actually among those who scored the worst. Much akin to the results of a famous study by Dunning and Kruger, the poorest performers did not generally realize that they lagged behind their peers.

Of the 1,209 people who participated, around 70% were overconfident about their knowledge of politics. But this basic pattern was not the most worrying part of the results.

The overconfident respondents failed to change their attitudes in response to my warnings about political falsehoods. My investigation showed that they did read the statements, and could report details about what they said. But their attitudes toward falsehoods remained inflexible, likely because they – wrongly – considered themselves political experts.

But if I could make overconfident respondents more humble, would they actually take my warnings about political falsehoods to heart?

Poor self-assessment

My experiment sought to examine what happens when overconfident people are told their political knowledge is lacking. To do this, I randomly assigned respondents to receive one of three experimental treatments after taking the political knowledge quiz. These were as follows:

1. Respondents received statements teaching them to avoid political falsehoods.
2. Respondents did not receive the statements.
3. Respondents received both the statements and a “reality check” treatment. The reality check showed how respondents fared on the political quiz they took at the beginning of the survey. Along with their raw score, the report showed how respondents ranked among 1,000 of their peers.

For example, respondents who thought they had aced the quiz might have learned that they got one out of five questions right, and that they scored worse than 82% of their peers. For many overconfident respondents, this “reality check” treatment brought them down to earth. They reported much less overconfidence on average when I followed up with them.

Finally, I asked all the respondents in the study to report their levels of skepticism toward five statements. These statements are all common political falsehoods. One statement, for example, asserted that violent crime had risen over the prior decade – it hadn’t. Another claimed the U.S. spent 18% of the federal budget on foreign aid – the real number was less than 1%.

I expected most respondents who had received my cautionary statements to become more skeptical of these misinformed statements. On average, they did. But did overconfident respondents learn this lesson too?

Reality check: Mission accomplished

The results of the study showed that overconfident respondents began to take political falsehoods seriously only if they had experienced my “reality check” treatment first.

While overconfident respondents in other conditions showed no reaction, the humbling nature of the “reality check,” when they realized how wrong they had been, led overconfident participants in that condition to revise their beliefs. They increased their skepticism of political falsehoods by a statistically significant margin.

Overall, this “reality check” experiment was a success. But it reveals that outside of the experiment, political overconfidence stands in the way of many Americans’ ability to accurately perceive political reality.

The problem of political overconfidence

What, if anything, can be done about the widespread phenomenon of political overconfidence?

While my research cannot determine whether political overconfidence is increasing over time, it makes intuitive sense that this problem would be growing in importance in an era of online political discourse. In the online realm, it is often difficult to appraise the credibility of anonymous users. This means that false claims are easily spread by uninformed people who merely sound confident.

To combat this problem, social media companies and opinion leaders could seek ways to promote discourse that emphasizes humility and self-correction. Because confident, mistaken self-expression can easily drown out more credible voices in the online realm, social media apps could consider promoting humility by reminding posters to reconsider the “stance,” or assertiveness, of their posts.

While this may seem far-fetched, recent developments show that small nudges can lead to powerful shifts in social media users’ online behavior.

For example, Twitter’s recent inclusion of a pop-up message that asks would-be posters of news articles to “read before tweeting” caused users to rethink their willingness to share potentially misleading content.

A gentle reminder to avoid posting bold claims without evidence is just one possible way that social media companies could encourage good online behavior. With another election season soon upon us, such a corrective is urgently needed.

Ian Anson, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tens of millions of people live in areas that are at risk for flooding due to climate change, sea level rise, and melting of glaciers. UMBC’s Vandana Janeja is leading a team of researchers using data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and polar science to analyze enormous volumes of climate data, and Arctic and Antarctic observations in ways that could help populations prepare for and respond to these risks.

Janeja, professor and chair of information systems, is the principal investigator on the five-year, $13 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) Big Idea program. With support from the grant, Janeja is directing iHARP, the NSF HDR Institute for Harnessing Data and Model Revolution in the Polar Regions.

To read the full article, please visit: 

https://umbc.edu/stories/umbc-to-lead-climate-focused-nsf-data-science-institute/

For Transfer Student Week, we're looking for unique T-shirt designs straight from our students! If you'd like to submit a design, use this Google form to submit your proposal: https://forms.gle/qCVuuBEm8AJaznCP9. The winner will receive a $20 bookstore gift card, a free T-shirt, and a shoutout from OCSS! The form will close on September 15th at 11:59PM, so be sure to get your designs in soon. If you have any questions, send an email to ijustice@umbc.edu!

Anupam Joshi, a professor focused on both high-impact computing research and expanding access to computer science and cybersecurity education, has been named a 2022–23 American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow.

Joshi is the Oros Family Professor and chair of computer science and electrical engineering at UMBC and director of UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity. He will spend the coming academic year with University System of Maryland (USM) leaders, shadowing both USM Chancellor Jay A. Perman and Bruce Jarrell, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). 

UMBC has a strong history of leaders participating in the ACE Fellows program, an intensive mentorship program that has prepared faculty, staff, and administrators for senior positions in college and university leadership since it began in 1965. More than 80 percent of the program’s 2,500 past Fellows have gone on to serve as chief executive officers, chief academic officers, other cabinet-level positions, or deans following their fellowship.

“The ACE Fellows program embodies ACE’s goal of enriching the capacity of agile leaders to problem-solve and innovate, and it fuels the expansion of a talented and diverse higher education leadership pipeline,” said ACE President Ted Mitchell. “Fellows continue to excel in prominent leadership roles, and the potential of this new cohort to bring strong leadership to institutions across America greatly excites me.”

Focus on innovating institutions

Following a rigorous application process, ACE selected 46 Fellows this year from colleges and universities across the United States. Throughout the year, these Fellows will observe and work with senior leaders at their host institution, attend decision-making meetings, and focus on issues of interest. They will also conduct projects of pressing concern for their home institutions, with the goal of returning after their fellowship year prepared to guide positive change.

“I am thrilled and honored to be mentored by two stalwarts of higher education in Chancellor Perman and President Jarrell,” Joshi says. “I look forward to learning from these leaders and working together to make a difference for the students in USM universities. I thank President Emeritus Hrabowski, President Sheares Ashby, and Provost Rous at UMBC for nominating me for this opportunity and their support.”

Leadership trajectory

Joshi obtained a B.Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi in 1989, and a master’s and Ph.D. from Purdue University in 1991 and 1993, respectively. He has published more than 275 technical papers, has been granted nine patents and obtained research support from a variety of federal and industrial sources. In 2014 he was named a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or IEEE.

As chair, Joshi leads one of UMBC’s largest departments. There he has overseen a near doubling of student enrollment at the graduate level and a 50% growth rate at the undergraduate level, accompanied by an increase in student body diversity. 

He has worked with partners in the UMBC Office of Institutional Advancement to raise funds supporting research from such industry partners as Northrop Grumman, GE, and Cisco. As a result of these efforts and collaboration with Jack Suess, UMBC’s chief information officer and vice president of information technology, the state recently announced the creation of a Maryland Institute for Innovative Computing at UMBC. 

Joshi directs the Center for Cybersecurity, which brings together scholarship and research in cybersecurity from computer science, information systems, social sciences, humanities, public policy, and natural sciences. In this role, he serves on the Maryland Cybersecurity Council. 

Additionally, Joshi directs UMBC’s Cyber Scholars Program, a joint effort between the Center for Cybersecurity and UMBC’s Center for Women in Technology. This program is focused on supporting a diverse next generation of leaders in cybersecurity and computing.

At the conclusion of the fellowship year, Joshi will return to these leadership roles with new knowledge and skills to expand UMBC’s work in innovative ways, supported by a network of emerging and longstanding university leaders across the nation.

This UMBC News story draws from an USM press release (8/31/2022). Learn more about ACE through stories on UMBC’s prior fellows, such as Tim Nohe, visual arts; Kate Tracy M.A. ‘01, Ph.D. ‘03, psychology; Sarah Shin, education; and Anne Brodsky, psychology, among others. UMBC President Emeritus Freeman Hrabowski currently serves as the inaugural ACE Centennial Fellow.