With shawms, and with cymbals, and harps of gold
Imagine a world where people lacked confidence. We would scarcely be able to face a new day, struggling to summon the courage to show our work to our bosses or apply for a new job. Surgeons would be racked with doubt about upcoming operations. Military commanders would hesitate at key moments when decisiveness was essential.
Confidence is so vital even for the mundane activities of everyday life that we take it for granted. (…) Confidence is widely held to be an almost magic ingredient of success in sports, entertainment, business, the stock market, combat and many other domains. At the same time, confidence can be dangerous.
Confidence in excess—overconfidence—can easily burn out of control and cause costly decision-making errors, policy failures, and wars. For example, overconfidence has been blamed for a string of major disasters from the 1990s dotcom bubble, to the 2008 collapse of the banks, to the ongoing foot-dragging over climate change (“it won’t happen to me”). These events are no blip in the longer timeline of human endeavor. Historians and political scientists have blamed overconfidence for a range of fiascos, from the First World War to Vietnam to Iraq.
We may be surprised by the recurring problem of overconfidence—why don’t people learn from their mistakes? As the archetypal self-doubter Woody Allen suggested, “Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem.” But the recurrence of overconfidence is no surprise to psychologists.
All mentally healthy people tend to have so-called “positive illusions” about our abilities, our control over events, and our vulnerability to risk. Numerous studies have shown that we overrate our intelligence, attractiveness, and skill. We also think we have better morals, health, and leadership abilities than others. (…)
Positive illusions appear to be undergirded by many different cognitive and motivational biases, all of which converge to boost people’s confidence. This is dangerous because people are more likely to think they are better than others, which makes aggression, conflict, and even war more likely. As psychologist Daniel Kahneman put it: “The bottom line is that all the biases in judgment that have been identified in the last 15 years tend to bias decision-making toward the hawkish side.”
