YSK: the Dunning-Kruger effect is controversial because it’s part of psychology’s repeatability problem.
Other famous psychology experiments like the ‘Stanford prison experiment’ or the ‘Milgram experiment’ fail to show what you learned in psych101. The prison experiment was so flawed as to be useless, and variations on the Milgram experiment show the opposite effect from the original.
For those familiar with the Milgram experiment: one variation of the study saw the “scientist” running the test replaced with a policeman or a military officer. In these circumstances, almost everybody refused to use high voltage.
collapse_already@lemmy.ml 6 months ago
To be clear, sometimes authority bias is good and proper. For instance, valuing the opinion of a climate scientist who has been studying climate chaos for thirty years more than your Aunt who saw Rush Limbaugh say climate change is a hoax in the 1990s is normal and rational.
Basically, authority bias as a reasoning flaw stems from misidentifying who is authoritative on a subject.
rambling_lunatic@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
In a vacuum, appealing to authority is fallacious. An idea must stand up on its own merits.
IRL, things get fuzzy. No one has the expertise and time to derive everything from first principles and redo every experiment ever performed. Thus we sadly have to have some level of trust in people.
C126@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
As long as the paper has the experiment well documented and it’s double blind, you don’t need to appeal to authority.
GrammarPolice@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I guess authority bias is most absurd when one tries to use it as a crutch to validate an argument.
You should believe me simply because ‘x’ researcher said this about the topic
Adalast@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I have to respectfully disagreed with your example. Ostensibly the researcher should be an authority. I think the example given in the chart is not quite right either. I think the confusion comes from the three definitions of “Authority”.
the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. “he had absolute authority over his subordinates”
a person or organization having power or control in a particular, typically political or administrative, sphere. “the health authorities”
the power to influence others, especially because of one’s commanding manner or one’s recognized knowledge about something.
In your example the “Authority” is definition 3, someone with specialized knowledge of a topic that should be listened to by those who are lay on the topic.
In the chart I think they were trying to go for 1, which is the correct source of Authority Bias, but they didn’t want to step on toes or get political. The actual example is someone who has decision authority like a police officer or politician or a boss at a workplace who says things and a listener automatically believes them regardless of the speakers actual specialized knowledge of the topic they are speaking on. A better example would be “Believing a vaccine is dangerous because a politician says it is.”
This all feeds into a topic I have been kicking around in my head for a while that I have been contemplating attempting to write up as a book. “The Death of Expertise”. So many people have been so brainwashed that authorities in definition 3 are met with a frankly asinine amount of incredulity, but authorities in the first are trusted regardless of education or demonstrable specialized knowledge.
RandomVideos@programming.dev 6 months ago
How do you validate an argument?
shneancy@lemmy.world 6 months ago
not all bias is made equal or always something negative. Sometimes it’s good to be biased towards the opinion of a scientist over the opinion of your aunt.
trolololol@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Well most people will choose a politician or actor instead of unknown Nobel prize winner. That’s how we got here.