Initial commitment
Examiner's note
An AK interactive field test
The Decision Autopsy
Dunning and Kruger have been hired to cover the midterms. They know almost nothing. More troublingly, they have not yet noticed.
Working hypothesis
Personality is not the verdict.
People often speak as though character were concrete: stubborn people stay stubborn, cautious people stay cautious. But decisions are made inside situations. Time pressure, identity, uncertainty, source quality and the cost of being wrong can change how a person reasons.
This quiz does not ask whether you are “open-minded”. It tests what you do when inconvenient evidence arrives after you have publicly committed yourself.
DUNNING: 104% CERTAINKRUGER: HAS SEEN A CHART
Evidence intake / live
Election Night, regrettably
Decision flexibility index
0/100
FrozenAdaptiveUntethered
Your field classification
Before the next ballot
Research note
What this is measuring
The result separates four behaviours that often get flattened into “open-mindedness”: seeking disconfirming information, tolerating uncertainty, recalibrating confidence, and resisting identity-protective reasoning. Cognitive flexibility itself has multiple definitions and measurement methods, so this experience avoids claiming one clinical score.
Likewise, the Dunning–Kruger effect is narrower than its meme: the original work compared people’s self-assessed performance with objective performance in specific tasks. Here, Dunning and Kruger are fictional satirical correspondents—not diagnoses applied to voters.