Who Can We Trust?

Dear Editor, 

We seem to have a trust issue of epic proportions these days.  Who should we believe?  What is real, what is fake, and what is actually somewhere in between?  It takes a fair amount of effort to evaluate the things we hear every day, and not everyone wants to put in the required work to truly understand.  In the absence of doing the work, should we simply believe our politicians, others in our communities, or even ourselves?  In all cases, probably not.

Our current Administration has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that we should not trust what they say:  They didn’t discuss sanctions – but they did.  Those people perpetrated the Bowling Green Massacre – but it doesn’t exist.  My election victory was the biggest since Ronald Reagan - but is wasn’t.  There are 96 million unemployed Americans looking for jobs – not even close.  There are hundreds of fact-checked examples.

Even in discussions with community members, “alternative facts” get confidently repeated as truths.  People have incomplete information, they aren’t able to draw logical conclusions from the available facts, or they simply latch onto anything that supports their point of view without regard to the source.  Ridiculous and fallacious memes abound online.  Everything must be taken with a grain of salt and skepticism.

But the worst part is, we can’t even trust ourselves!  It’s natural to believe that our thinking is reasonable, level-headed, and impeccably logical.  But research proves that this is simply not always the case.  David Dunning and Justin Kruger from Cornell University studied people’s belief in their own social and intellectual competency.  In their research paper, they even provided an amusing anecdote about how a person’s absolute belief in their own mental competency can lead them far astray..

They recite a true story about a man who brazenly robbed a couple of banks in broad daylight without even bothering to conceal his face.  Not surprisingly, he was quickly caught.  After his capture, the man incredulously asked how the police were able to identify him.  After all, before entering the banks he had cleverly rubbed lemon juice on his face (known to serve as invisible ink), which obviously would have rendered his face invisible to the security cameras.  He was absolutely convinced that this thought process was rational and infallible.

In their studies, Dunning and Kruger discovered that people with low levels of competency in a given area (logic, grammar, etc.) tended to grossly overestimate their abilities in that area relative to their peers.  Even those who were the least capable in a particular area believed that their competency must be greater than the majority of their peers; in other words, they believed that they were a lot smarter than they really were.  So in the absence of direct, empirical data, it is unlikely that an individual will know if they fall in the lowest quartile of competency or the highest quartile.

Everyday others will attempt to convince us that their information is trustworthy, while other sources of information cannot be trusted.  Some cover the shortcomings of their arguments with lemon juice hoping that we won’t notice.  On top of that, we can’t even trust our assessments of our own competency.  Something for all of us to keep in mind both for ourselves and when listening to others.  Apparently, the relevant adage for today’s environment is “Don’t trust, and diligently verify.”  Sad.

Brian Patterson

Manson