LET US KNOW OVERCONFIDENCE

Overconfidence

We generally tend to think that we know more than we do. If someone asks us questions about the certainty of our answer we tend to be more confident than correct. The best example is the following anagram given by Richard Goranson (1978). He asked people to unscramble the alphabets:

WREAT – WATER
ETRYN – ENTRY
GRABE – BARGE

Now see how many seconds would you require to unscramble this alphabet. Did hindsight bias come in the way? Knowing answers make us overconfident. The solution would take only 10 seconds for us to answer while in reality, the problem solver requires 3 minutes.

The question arises are we better at predicting social behaviors? Students show that this may not be always the case. Philip Turlock (1998,2005) collected more than 27000 expert predictions on world events such as the future of South Africa or whether Quebec would separate from Canada. He found that these predictions which experts made with 80% confidence on average were right less than 40% of the time.



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AYUSH HEALTH AND WELLNESS™