Study: People Who Know Least About Politics Are Most Overconfident
Mar 7th 2026
A new Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied study finds widespread overconfidence in political facts, especially among people with low political knowledge and among some conservatives, and links this bias to thinking style and reliance on the wrong cues for knowing.
- Participants were generally overconfident about their political knowledge, with the biggest gap between confidence and accuracy among the lowest scorers.
- Those who leaned conservative and who had a high need for cognitive closure showed higher overconfidence.
- Researchers measured both global pretest confidence and per-answer confidence on a 60-item political quiz and 20 general knowledge questions.
- Political knowledge predicted metacognitive accuracy better than political orientation, and high-knowledge conservatives and liberals had similar calibration.
- The study sampled 216 US adults on Amazon Mechanical Turk and the authors caution the findings may not generalize to more diverse or highly politicized populations.