This begins with the observation that incompetent people often lack the skill to recognize their incompetence and tend to believe they’re particularly good at the stuff they can’t do, in spite of the obvious evidence. There are some fascinating correlations with social privilege.
Belmi, P., Neale, M.A., Reiff, D., & Ulfe, R. (2020). The social advantage of miscalibrated individuals: The relationship between social class and overconfidence and its implications for class-based inequality. Journal of personality and social psychology 118(2):254-282. doi: 10.1037/pspi0000187.
Also at:
Dunning-Kruger overconfidence confers an advantage in interpersonal relations and career path because interlocutors commonly misinterpret it as competence and give the subject the nod, or the trust, or the job. Self-confidence is perceived as charismatic.
How is social class relevant? Families with relatively high social class encourage overconfidence in their children. Desire for higher social class status (which is more prevalent among those who already have relatively high status) also correlates with misplaced overconfidence.
According to the first author, Belmi, the overconfidence effect may be partially due to differences in values between the middle and working classes.
“In the middle class, people are socialized to differentiate themselves from others, to express what they think and feel and to confidently express their ideas and opinions, even when they lack accurate knowledge. By contrast, working-class people are socialized to embrace the values of humility, authenticity and knowing your place in the hierarchy,” he said. “These findings challenge the widely held belief that everybody thinks they are better than the average. Our results suggest that this type of thinking might be more prevalent among the middle and upper classes.”
I can attest that many a ‘worker bee’ in industry has experienced people who don’t know what they’re doing getting promoted to the top. This suggests a social process underlying Laurence Peter’s principle that people in a hierarchical organization tend to get promoted to their personal “level of incompetence”. The phenomenon doesn’t merely freeze social mobility (as Belli et al. note), it also fills the upper ranks of society with people who don’t know what they’re doing, even as the charisma of their misplaced confidence is perceived as actual competence by their immediate superiors (themselves perhaps less than fully competent for their posts).
And now the elefantiasis in the body politic,
… how it's possible that some people think Donald Trump is competent: he's like a cartoon version of the hypothesis, a scion of inordinate wealth who develops a self-presentation so confident as to seem insane when you think about it (in fact it is insane, but that's another matter), masking a total incompetence in any matter he touches if you know anything about it, and lives off it for decades because the confidence charisma convinces enough people in the right places that he really is capable (many of them incompetent too), until he's finally all the way at the top of the hierarchy and we're scratching our heads in wonderment.
It's a confidence game in every sense of the word, and a kind of Dunning-Kruger syndrome by proxy, where a huge swathe of the population has come to believe in this man's skills simply because he seems so certain he has them, though it's obvious from the things he says, if you know anything about them …, that he doesn't.
Yastreblyansky (David Bloom)