2.2 Overconfidence

Fun anagram solutions from Wordsmith (www.wordsmith.org): Snooze alarms = Alas! No more z’s Dormitory = dirty room
Slot machines = cash lost in ’em

We humans tend to think we know more than we do. Asked how sure we are of our answers to factual questions (Is Boston north or south of Paris?), we tend to be more confident than correct.1 Or consider these three anagrams, which Richard Goranson (1978) asked people to unscramble:

Overconfidence in history:

“We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on their way out.”

Decca Records, in turning down a recording contract with the Beatles in 1962

WREAT → WATER

ETRYN → ENTRY

“Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”

Popular Mechanics, 1949

GRABE → BARGE

About how many seconds do you think it would have taken you to unscramble each of these? Did hindsight influence you? Knowing the answers tends to make us overconfident. (Surely the solution would take only 10 seconds or so.) In reality, the average problem solver spends 3 minutes, as you also might, given a similar anagram without the solution: OCHSA.2

“They couldn’t hit an elephant at this distance.”

General John Sedgwick just before being killed during a U.S. Civil War battle, 1864

Are we any better at predicting social behavior? University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock (1998, 2005) collected more than 27,000 expert predictions of world events, such as the future of South Africa or whether Quebec would separate from Canada. His repeated finding: These predictions, which experts made with 80 percent confidence on average, were right less than 40 percent of the time. Nevertheless, even those who erred maintained their confidence by noting they were “almost right.” “The Québécois separatists almost won the secessionist referendum.”

22

“The telephone may be appropriate for our American cousins, but not here, because we have an adequate supply of messenger boys.”

British expert group evaluating the invention of the telephone

RETRIEVAL PRACTICE

  • Why, after friends start dating, do we often feel that we knew they were meant to be together?

We often suffer from hindsight bias—after we’ve learned a situation’s outcome, that outcome seems familiar and therefore obvious.