The Science Is Settled: Journalists ARE Stupider Than U and Me

It’s Sunday so I offer a prayer for journalists:

If you’re unfamiliar with the Dunning-Kruger Effect it states that some people are not only incompetent but their incompetence robs them of the mental ability to realize just how inept they are. Or put another way, they know not what they know not…

Physics? I don’t need no stinkin’ physics!

…and proceed accordingly.

That seems to explain the vast majority of the journalist class. And perhaps this explains why: Journalists drink too much, are bad at managing emotions, and operate at a lower level than average, according to a new study. Excerpts:

Journalists’ brains show a lower-than-average level of executive functioning, according to a new study, which means they have a below-average ability to regulate their emotions, suppress biases, solve complex problems, switch between tasks, and show creative and flexible thinking…

The results showed that journalists’ brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly because of dehydration and the tendency of journalists to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods…

Forty-one percent of the subjects said they drank 18 or more units of alcohol a week, which is four units above the recommended weekly allowance. Less than 5% drank the recommended amount of water.

However, in interviews conducted in conjunction with the brain profile results, the participants indicated they felt their jobs had a lot of meaning and purpose…

There were two areas however where the journalists rated well:

• Abstraction, the ability to deal with ideas rather than events. It’s related to the part of the brain where the most sophisticated problem-solving takes place. In other words, it highlights the ability to think outside the box and make connections where others might not see them.

Unfortunately the “ideas” they deal with are most often progressive agendas and the “abstraction” applied generally involves creating narratives that use the “sophisticated problem-solving” skills generally referred to as lying – which involves making facts up out of whole cloth as well as telling half-truths.

I will say, based on my personal experience with journalists, their abilities of abstraction are negligent; either that or they don’t think abstraction means what I think abstraction means.

• Value tagging, the ability to assign values to different sensory cues, such as whether something is a priority or has meaning. Scoring highly in this area indicates a good ability to sift through information and pick out what’s important.

And for clarification of “what’s important” to journalists, see discussion re. “abstraction” above.

The take away from the article concludes that, for journalists, “the meaning and purpose they attribute to their work contributes to helping them remain mentally resilient.”

But of course: without the “meaning and purpose” all of their lying would go unappreciated and their moral superiority be unnoticed.

Calvin, illustrating the Dunning-Kruger Effect