The dangers of being over-confident

magine you are in a fight with a grizzly bear. And you’re not armed. It’s just you against the bear in a straight fight. Who do you think would win? How about in a fight with a crocodile or a king cobra or an eagle?

When over 1,700 people were asked these questions in a YouGov poll in the US in 2021, 6% of respondents reckoned they could beat the bear and a slighter larger number fancied their chances against the crocodile. And when it came to a fight with a king cobra, fully 23% of men said they would win. Meanwhile, 38% of men thought they could beat an eagle.

Maybe, some of the respondents were Tarzan-types with superb fighting skills. More likely they were showing off or were ridiculously overconfident.

So, how about landing a plane in an emergency without crashing it and killing everybody on board? Could you do that? In a recent study, a researcher called Kayla Jordan at the University of Waikato in New Zealand asked this question.

Again, the levels of over-confidence were striking. Half of the people she asked thought they had a one-in-five-chance of landing the plane successfully. And when those questioned were shown a three-minute video of a trained pilot landing a plane, they became even more confident, rating their chances at 30%. A quarter of respondents went even further saying they put their chances at 60%.

You might also like:

Why stroking is good for you

Are we naturally lazy?

Five ways to hack your memory

Yes, in a scenario in which they suddenly had to take the controls of plane without any help, and while acknowledging that landing a plane is a highly skilled task, requiring great expertise, an astounding number of people with no experience or skill thought they were more likely than not to bring the plane safely to ground. This was despite the fact that the video was shot from the back of the cockpit, there was no sound, viewers couldn’t see what the pilots’ hands were doing from that angle and a pilot who watched it declared it 100% useless.

Of course, there are real-life examples of passengers who have taken the controls of a plane and landed it successfully after a pilot has fallen ill and collapsed in the cockpit. A recent example took place in Florida in May 2022. But the passenger in this instance, Darren Harrison, had the benefit of being talked through the landing by an air traffic controller who was also a flying instructor. An experienced pilot has estimated that the chance of someone landing a plane without help is 10-15%, much lower odds than many in the New Zealand study gave themselves.

Over-confidence isn’t only on display in situations of life and death. Another YouGov poll asked people if they could score a point against 23-time Grand Slam winner Serena Williams in a game of tennis if they were playing at their very best. Seven per cent of respondents felt they could, rising to 12% among men.

Driving is another area where we have an exaggerated sense of our abilities. In a much-cited study from the US in 1981, it was found that 93% of drivers believed they were above average drivers, which is of course statistically highly unlikely. This cognitive bias sometimes gets called the Lake Wobegon Effect after the author Garrison Keiller’s fictional town in which all the children are above average; a more technical term is illusory superiority or simply, the-above-average effect.

Success often comes from taking risks and stretching ourselves to the limits of our abilities or beyond

For someone to be above average, some people do of course need to be average and others need to be below average, but we still don’t like placing ourselves in the latter category.

Likewise, few of us care to admit we don’t know things and this can lead to overclaiming. Have you heard of cholarine? How about plates of parallax? Both are made-up scientific terms, but a neat study found many people said yes when they were asked if they had heard of them.

Of course, a little over-confidence can be useful. We want children to believe in themselves and have a go at new things. Success often comes from taking risks and stretching ourselves to the limits of our abilities or beyond. If you display confidence in yourself, you inspire confidence in others. You are more likely to be believed, trusted and promoted if you express your views confidently. There is, though, a paradoxical element to all this boosterism which is known in psychology as the Dunning-Kruger effect after a study which showed that the people who overestimated their abilities the most were the worst when it came to actual attainment.

This has been contested by some but I fear I fell victim to this effect during the Covid lockdowns. I’d long thought I might be a good piano player if only I had a piano on which to hone my innate skills. But when I bought a piano and started to practise, what I quickly learnt was not a Chopin etude or Rachmaninov’s 2nd Piano Concerto, but a hard lesson: I am rubbish at the piano.

So where does all this overconfidence come from? An obvious factor is personality type. In work on overclaiming, people who score high on narcissism are far more likely to be know-it-alls. And as we’ve seen already, gender also has an impact. Whether it’s fighting a bear or winning a point off Serena Williams, on average men are more likely to display overconfidence. Of course, men do tend to be physically stronger than women, so perhaps we’d expect to see this pattern with these types of question, but when it comes to landing a plane, men were also more confident than women.

The obvious problem with misplaced confidence is that it can get us into trouble

However, it’s not just about who we are, but what we do. If you think back to the study where people watched the video of the cockpit, it was that experience which increased their confidence. The authors believe the reason the video had such an impact was that it acted as a springboard to imagine themselves in that role.

The obvious problem with misplaced confidence is that it can get us into trouble. Kayla Jordan, who carried out the plane-landing study, certainly believes we should guard against it, as she told me in an interview on the BBC’s All in the Mind.

"We have established that watching just one really short video can boost confidence by nearly 28%. If you think you can land a plane when you can’t, then the rest of the passengers might be grateful if you allowed someone with more expertise to do the job."

This is surely sound advice. We live in a culture that encourages us to think that we "can do anything" if only we "believe in ourselves". We don’t want to be hobbled by self-doubt or a fear of failure. But an honest assessment of our abilities is important too. So, if you find yourself facing a grizzly bear it is probably better to avoid getting into a fight. And if Serena Williams challenges you to a game of tennis, it might be best to offer a polite "no".