The Psychological Code of the Common Believer
If you had a magic wand, what psychological biases would you eliminate from human nature? Is it widespread group preferential treatment? A defense for unethical behavior? The answer of Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize for , is: overconfidence.
But why is overconfidence a problem?
Attitude confidence (also called attitude certainty), which describes a person's degree of confidence in his or her own opinions. In one study, researchers sampled thousands of people's attitudes, confidence and actions in different areas, including sports, entertainment, religious beliefs, leisure styles and other topics.
It was found that if two people have a positive attitude towards the same interest, but one of them is more certain about this positive attitude, he is more likely to take action on it. This makes attitudinal confidence one of the attributes that has received the most attention in all attitude research over a long period of time.
Confidence itself is not a terrible thing. After all, if you are not confident that you can complete something, then you will never take action - but when people become overconfident in their own attitudes and beliefs , psychological cognitive biases will occur. Common manifestations of overconfidence include:
1. Believing that one's performance is significantly better than actual performance;
2. Extremely believing that one's beliefs/views are correct;
3. Believing that oneself is significantly better than others.
In a recent study, researchers also found that the cognitive bias of overconfidence is socially contagious.
In this study, participants were asked to complete a task. Before the task began, the researchers chose to let some people come into contact with participants who had previously shown overconfidence, and then measured and evaluated their state when completing the task.
You might think that being exposed to overconfident people would make participants more cautious in their assessment of themselves in completing the task, but in fact, it had the opposite effect: Participants who were exposed to overconfident people became Even more overconfident, the proportion is even higher, ranging from 15% to 25%.
Additionally, the researchers found that participants' overconfidence lasted for 2-5 days and spread to other activities.
So, now you know why Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman jokingly said that he should use a magic wand to eliminate people's overconfidence and attitude bias.
When you reflect on your attitude in the future, you might as well take a few more seconds to think about whether there is anything in yourself that might be overconfident.
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