3.
OVERCONFIDENCE BLINKERS
“Overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.”
Maximilien de Robespierre, Galileo Lovano, Bonnie Prince Lorenzo, Wounded Knee, Queen Shaddock, Pygmalion, Murphy’s Last Ride, Doctor Faustus. Do you recognize any of these?
These were the historical names and events that a team of researchers, led by Cameron Anderson from Haas School of Business, University of California, gave 243 MBA students at the beginning of the semester. The students had to identify which ones they knew or recognized. Mixed in with the real names, the researchers included made-up ones such as Galileo Lovano, Bonnie Prince Lorenzo, Queen Shaddock, and Murphy’s Last Ride (you knew that, didn’t you?). Those students who selected the most invented names were considered to be the most overly confident, because they believed they were more knowledgeable than they actually were.9
A survey at the end of the semester revealed that those same overly confident individuals achieved the highest social status within their groups. They engendered respect among their peers, tending to be more admired, listened to and generally having more influence in the group’s decisions. Anderson noted that the group members did not think of their high-status peers as over-confident. They simply thought that they were fantastic, so their overconfidence did not come across as arrogant or narcissistic, but as a sign of their wonderful natures.10
A sense of realistic confidence, based on competence, is vital for surviving and thriving in the world. A lack of realistic confidence results in low esteem, under-performance in the workplace, poor relationships and can have negative consequences for our mental health and our quality of life.11 Conversely, taking Anderson’s research one step further, realistically confident people tend to attract success and achievement in their chosen fields, including getting the jobs they apply for, promotions, clinching the big deals, or winning the big accounts.12
Realistic confidence doesn’t get us in trouble, but its bedfellow, over-confidence, does. Over-confidence is a bias where we inaccurately perceive and assess our judgement and abilities as being overly positive. Research carried out over more than 50 years shows that people have an overwhelming propensity to rate themselves as being “above average” in almost all respects. For example, motorcyclists believe that they are less likely to cause an accident than the typical motorcyclist, and business leaders believe their company is more likely to succeed than the average firm in their industry. Research also shows that 94% of university professors say that they do above-average work, surgical trainees place too much confidence in their diagnoses after looking at X-ray evidence, and clinical psychologists overestimate the chance that their predictions will prove accurate.13 Despite its pitfalls, over-confidence is still common due to its profound social benefits. In the political arena, for example, it has been shown that if voters find confident politicians more credible, then contenders for leadership learn that to win an election, they need to express more confidence than their opponents.14
Professions that rely on the accumulation of knowledge and expertise must then be cautious about falling victim to their own over-confidence and the expectations of those who rely on them for advice. Heraclitus’ words recorded more than 2,500 years ago still ring true today:
“Although we need the Word to keep things known in the common, people still treat specialists as if their nonsense were a form of wisdom.”
Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1995, Andy Grove, then CEO of Intel, was dismayed by the doctors’ straightforward and categorical advice that surgery was the best treatment option for him. Nicknamed “Let’s think for ourselves Grove” by his autobiographer Richard S Tedlow, Grove did not take the advice of doctors at face value. As someone who had survived both the Nazis and the communists before migrating from Hungary to the US in the 1950s, Grove was determined to explore the best options available to him to survive the cancer. He undertook extensive research into his illness, which quickly revealed alternatives to surgery. He uncovered data that was readily available, but which none of his doctors had mentioned or advised him to take seriously. Shocked to be confronted with the narrow mindset of his doctors, Grove settled on an alternative procedure known as “radiation seeding.”
When Grove asked the doctor who carried out this procedure what he would do if he were in his shoes, the doctor said that he would probably have surgery. Then he continued to explain to a surprised Grove: “You know, all through medical training, they drummed into us that the gold standard for prostate cancer is surgery. I guess that still shapes my thinking.”15
In an article he wrote for Fortune magazine in 1996, “Taking On Prostrate Cancer,” Grove recalls the words of Dr Thomas A Stamey, the head of the urology department at Stanford University at the time, who explained the challenge facing the medical profession:
“...when faced with a serious illness beyond our comprehension [each of us] becomes childlike, afraid, and looking for someone to tell us what to do. It is an awesome responsibility for the surgeon to present the options to a patient with prostate cancer in such a way that he does not impose his prejudices, which may or may not be based on the best objective information. I think we have a long way to go to reach this ideal.”
The reality is that the very thing that enables people to become experts and contribute to their own field, their deep knowledge and specific focus of research may also limit their perspective. People who are recognized in their area of expertise and rewarded for their specialization usually don’t have the incentive to look outside that area. The more specialized they become, the narrower their view may become. Experts are often too invested in what they know to question what they know, or to admit that they don’t know.16