Overconfidence effect
Our confidence in our own judgments is often higher than our actual accuracy. We feel more certain than our track record justifies.
In everyday life
A manager is certain a project will ship in three months because the plan looks solid, and it takes seven.
You take a trivia quiz and mark every answer as 'definitely right,' but when the scores come back you got only about half of them.
Why your mind does this
To act at all, we need some belief that our choices matter and that we can pull them off. A bit of extra confidence gets us moving, keeps us going after setbacks, and protects our sense of self-worth and our standing in a group.
Its family, in 30 seconds: Confidence to act
How to spot it
Ask yourself how often you have felt this sure before and still turned out to be wrong.
How to counter it
Give a range instead of a single number, and make it wide enough that you'd be surprised if the answer fell outside it.
Habits that catch it
- Start from the base rate
Ask how things like this usually turn out before you look at what makes this case special.
Same family: Confidence to act
- Overconfidence effect
- Social desirability bias
- Third-person effect
- False consensus effect
- Hard-easy effect
- Lake Wobegon effect
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- Egocentric bias
- Optimism bias
- Forer effect
- Barnum effect
- Self-serving bias
- Actor-observer bias
- Illusion of control
- Illusory superiority
- Fundamental attribution error
- Defensive attribution hypothesis
- Trait ascription bias
- Effort justification
- Risk compensation
- Peltzman effect