Overconfidence is a common part of
human experience. In a recent blog
entry, for example, I wrote about how people who are fans of a particular
football team are overconfident about their team’s chances at winning games. There is also a strong tendency for people to
be overconfident in their predictions for their own performance in the
future. When asked about how they will
do on an upcoming exam, students often predict that their score will be better
than it actually is.
This tendency toward
overconfidence seems particularly strong in people who have the least cause to
be overconfident. Justin Kruger and
David Dunning explored this issue in detail in a 1999 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across a range of tasks from judging humor to
logical reasoning, they found that the worst performers were the most
overconfident in their abilities. The
people who did best on these tasks were reasonably accurate at predicting how
well they would do, but the people who did worst were highly overconfident.
This pattern is a potentially
dangerous mix. It is potentially disastrous for someone to enter with
confidence into a situation in which they have no real ability.
The situation may not be quite as
bad as it seems, though. A paper in the
March, 2011 issue of the Journal of
Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition by Tyler Miller and Lisa Geraci suggests that the
worst performers may overestimate their performance, but they may not be truly
overconfident.
As they point out, there are two
dimensions of overconfidence. One way to
be overconfident is to believe that you will perform better than you actually
do perform. Technically, that is just overprediction. To be truly overconfident, you also need to
be confident in your prediction for your performance. That is, you need to think you are going to
do well in an upcoming situation, and you need to be relatively certain that
your prediction is accurate.
To explore this issue, students in
a psychology class were asked to predict their grade on an upcoming exam. They were also asked to state how confident
they were in that prediction.
Consistent with previous work, the
people who performed well on the exam made reasonably accurate predictions for
their grade. Those who performed poorly
(getting grades below 70) tended to overpredict their score by 10 or more
points.
However, the group that did most
poorly on the exam was also the least confident in their predictions. That is, this group made bad predictions, but
these individuals also had a sense that they did not have a good basis for
making a prediction.
What is going on here?
The people who do most poorly in
an area also tend to know the last about it.
One reason why the worst performers overpredict performance is that they
do not realize how much they don’t know.
Predictions by experts often get better, because they have a better
sense of how much they know as well as of how much they don’t know.
That said, at least some poor performers
seem to have some clue that they are on shaky ground. That is why their confidence in their
predictions is low.
Ultimately, though, you should
recognize that you are likely to overpredict your performance. When you start out in a new area, be prepared
to do less well than you anticipate that you will. Perhaps the knowledge that you tend to be
overconfident will give you some motivation to work harder to achieve the level
of performance you hope for.
