Overconfidence bias effect exapmle

Overconfidence bias means overconfidence in one's own opinions. Rather than examining the evidence, overconfident people say:

“I believe what I think.”

This bias has been observed in many situations: voters overrate politicians’ traits, people wrongly evaluate their partners' intentions, and many other areas.

In new research, however, researchers in Australia, Britain, and Italy found that people with bias in these areas are also less likely to change their minds if they are corrected for their bias or face counter evidence.

The study, published last month in Psychological Science, was one of the first to test whether these biases persist across a range of situations.

Here is an example of the confidence effect in action. Last year, both people and universities started providing students with a biometrics system that would compare each student’s facial measurements to their tax records to prove their identities and prevent fraud.

Students were excited about the potential to have better security, but there was no consensus among students about how to implement the system. Students started signing up for the program, not knowing how it would work in practice.

The system requires students to enter their tax data into a secure computer terminal. And this is where the overconfidence effect comes into play.

When students came to a secure computer terminal and their tax information was verified, the average level of confidence was 46% – more than 90% of the students believed that their data was valid and never suspected that there was fraud.

Students who were nervous or not confident that they had a correct tax record showed higher confidence rates. Students who overstated their confidence in their identity for the purposes of fraud detection showed similar results.

verconfidence psychology | Research

Verconfidence is defined as a measure of certainty as opposed to an uncertainty.

The difference between verconfidence and confidence is that confidence represents a perceived strength.

Verconfidence represents a perceived value that is likely to be realized, and perhaps also an objective measure of value.

As stated in the researchers’ statement “The results of our study provide a critical insight into the nature of confidence and lay out a universal and psychometrically rigorous framework for calculating confidence.“

Passion for science and crea

One of the most common cognitive biases observed in the field of psychology is overconfidence bias. This bias can explain many personality traits like overconfidence and optimism. Overconfidence is described as the tendency to have unrealistic beliefs about one’s abilities. People with overconfidence typically believe that they are better than other people and will sometimes not ask for advice.

Success is subjective

One of the many reasons why people overvalue their capabilities is because their success is relative to what their peers are doing. People tend to follow the behaviors of those they admire. For example, if a person admires a successful musician they may develop the habit of taking up the guitar or become an aspiring singer.

A good example is the scene from the movie The King’s Speech where the lead character George Banks impresses his parents by singing a song with gusto and confidence even though he is constantly told by them that he will never have a career.

Success is subjective.

overconfidence bias example

Most times we will have an experience of seemingly unbelievable success or negative experiences with other people. The next time you go to the grocery store and have a sale with a new bunch of groceries for $100, it is amazing. The next time you get one of those crock pots on sale, you will get one for $5. And that day you will be celebrating your success. You will go to your friends and share your recent purchase and overconfidence bias will tell you that they will be overconfident with their success.

Let’s look at an example of overconfidence bias.

Two people are looking at a room that has been completely destroyed and just before a tornado hits it.

The first person says to the second person, “Have you seen a tornado in this room before?” The second person goes to see it to see what it looks like. He will say, “No, I don’t think there is a tornado in here.”

The first person is overconfident that no tornado was in the room and that the second person is not seeing the real damage of a tornado and will say, You don’t believe me?

Look again. And the second person does look and is shocked and will say,

“There is definitely a tornado in there.”

The first person can say, “This is what you see and there is definitely no tornado.” But the second person will say, “This is what I see and there is definitely a tornado in here.” The first person may say, “Maybe there was no tornado in the room.” And the second person may say, “There is definitely a tornado in the room.”

Notice that we can say, This is what I see.

This is what I think I see. We are not going to admit that we were mistaken and that we were mistaken. But people see themselves more honestly than this overconfidence bias. The person saying, “You don’t believe me? Look again.” is expressing their overconfidence bias. The person saying, “You are overconfident with your success” is stating their willingness to give a second opportunity for someone to learn about their overconfidence bias.

The person who was overconfident and gave another opportunity and the person giving another opportunity are both showing overconfidence bias and showing that they give a second opportunity to learn.

overconfidence psychology:

University of Texas psychology professor Philip E. Tate Lock studied more confidence over a period of more than a decade when a lot of basic scientific knowledge about human behavior was available. But the words were not seen in terms of skill, knowledge, or more confidence. He identified one well-known bias that appears in situations where expertise was obvious, but which he called the bias of overconfidence.

He studied the bias in the evaluation of experts, assessing the experts in their ability to discriminate objective truths from subjective truths, predictions, decisions, and their actual performance. To study experts from all kinds of disciplines, Tetlock’s team compiled the records of 1.8 million recommendations and decisions made in the fields of economics, health, education, law, and politics.

They repeated the experiment twice over, providing accurate information to the scientists to alter the outcomes.

Scientists were viewed by experts with the same age and confidence.

This study shows that there is a bias of overconfidence, overconfidence bias. The individuals had strong confidence in their abilities, and more than a third rated their confidence as the strongest predictor of their actual results.

If you’re an overconfident scientist…I recommend more humility. I mean, this is the honest truth of it:

As I have written about before, I do think we underestimate our own abilities, and I do recommend this exercise:

Sum up your scientific achievements and assume that you are more than half as effective as you actually are.

Now look at your decisions.

Start by writing down what you expected would happen when you made the decision. What happened? Did you make the decision in a logical, reasoned way? Where did it go off the rails? And then write about the decision that you took and your reasons. Did you calculate things right? How did you do it? How did you explain your reasoning?

Then look for patterns in your decisions that you did not consider. Did you disregard experts who could have helped you make better decisions? How often did you make certain mistakes? Why didn’t you call experts?

 Overconfidence psychology.