Abstract: To pursue modern national governance, its citizens are supposed to equip with high political knowledge literacy and political cognitive ability as ignorant and blind citizens may mislead decision-makes to adopt irrational public policies and create an imbalanced public opinion space. The “D-K effect”, employed in social psychology to reveal the overconfidence phenomenon that “the ignorant are more confident”, is adopted in this study with Chinese ordinary netizens and Chinese college students as the survey objects, to make a statistical analysis on the political cognitive ability of the Chinese people. The results show that:1) compared with the latter, the former has a lower level of political cognition; 2) there are also gaps in their cognition of their own actual political knowledge: netizens with lower political cognition tend to overestimate while these with higher political cognition tend to underestimate their own political knowledge. Generally speaking, “D-K effect” is commonly available in the political field and there is a significant correlation between cognitive closure, authoritarian personality and overconfidence, which can partly explain the source of overconfidence. How to improve the political cognitive ability of some people under the new situation of broadening the channels for the public to participate in and discuss politics has become an urgent problem for China’s national governance in the new era, this paper finds.

Key words: over-confidence, D-K effect, political knowledge, political ability, modern national governance