STYLE SELF C U LT U R E POWER

M AY 1 5 , 2 0 1 4

It Pays to Be Overconfident, Even When You Have No

Idea What You’re Doing
By Matthew Hutson

Photo: Jason Squires/WireImage

In his New York Times column earlier this week, David Brooks, responding to an essay in The
Atlantic about how women have less con dence than men, wrote that “recent psychological research
… suggests that overcon dence is our main cognitive problem, not the reverse.”

It’s certainly easy to come up with examples of overcon dence getting us into trouble — the Iraq War,
the nancial meltdown, that guy who challenged a heavyweight boxing champion to a ght last week
— but overcon dence may actually be bene cial, at least for the person with the big head.

Consider Kanye West, one of the greatest bloviators of all time. Here is a partial list of people Kanye
has compared himself to: Michael Jackson, Picasso, Beethoven, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, and of
course Jesus, who presumably died so that Yeezus could live. Even in an industry built on
braggadocio, his crowing seems excessive. But it may also be the key to the spell he casts, even over
the haters: According to new research, overcon dence increases one’s status even when it’s been
exposed as overcon dence.

Of course, Kanye comes from a long line of overcon dent beings — the whole Homo sapiens species.
Psychologists argue that we have evolved to overestimate our abilities, to see ourselves as better than
our peers, and to be overly certain about our judgments. People regularly show overcon dence about
their athletic ability, the quality of their marriages, and the promise of their academic research. In
one study, percent of Americans declared themselves better-than-average drivers.

So we all live in Lake Wobegon. But whether or not we consider that a character aw, it may be an
evolutionary asset. In recent years, some researchers have been pushing the idea that overcon dence,
and self-deception in general, evolved to fool others, a notion rst proposed by the biologist Robert
Trivers and developed further in a book. We deceive ourselves about our superiority so that we
may better deceive our potential competitors, collaborators, benefactors, and mates. To be a good
salesman, you have to buy your own pitch.

In , Cameron Anderson at Berkeley and his colleagues published a paper supporting this idea,
showing that overcon dence increases one’s status. Subjects who overestimated their abilities at
group tasks were more respected and in uential in the group. It turns out, we tend to (over)use
con dence as a useful proxy for competence — if you speak rmly, it sounds like you know what
you’re talking about. People who showed more con dence, regardless of their actual ability, were
judged to be more capable and accorded more regard by their peers.

But a new paper has even more striking ndings, with implications for those who overestimate their
skills so grievously that you might expect to see backlash (see Trump, Donald). Jessica Kennedy of
Vanderbilt, working with Anderson and Don Moore of Berkeley, showed subjects videos of actors
playing subjects from a previous experiment. In the clips, the actors displayed either a medium or
high amount of con dence during a group discussion, and subjects rated those displaying greater
con dence as having more status (respect and in uence) in the group. Then they were told the
targets’ purported scores on a related task — they were in either the th or st percentile — and
asked to rate them again. Even after learning the scores, subjects saw average performers as having
higher status when they had lots of con dence than when their con dence matched their abilities.

The paper also reveals two factors that may buoy the status of the obviously overcon dent against the
weight of censure: greater con dence leads to greater peer-rated social skill and greater peer-rated
task ability, regardless of actual ability. The researchers suspect that con dence increases leadership-
like behavior, such as talkativeness and active engagement, and also reduces anxiety, which allows for
more uid interaction, and that these behaviors may make one seem more socially skilled. As for the
e ect of con dence on perceived ability even after actual ability has been reported, the authors note
the lasting power of rst impressions have been long known to disproportionately a ect our
judgments of others. All of this suggests that even when we’re unmasked as less skilled than our self-
assured manner would suggest, there are ancillary social bene ts to overcon dence.

Maybe this is how pundits (and Times columnists) maintain their audience, and why political
candidates feel free to make undeliverable campaign pledges: There may simply be insu cient
downside to their overpromising. The logic applies even if your leadership role is on a slightly less
grand scale than the leader of the free world’s, according to a paper Connson Locke of the London
School of Economics and Anderson have submitted for publication. In one study, subjects discussed
two hypothetical job candidates with someone playing their superior. The person playing their
superior always argued for the candidate who was clearly (to the subject) weaker. When he acted
more con dently, the superior was rated as more capable, even though he was expressing his
con dence in favor of a clearly weaker candidate. This con dence, even in the wrong choice, made
subjects more likely to defer to him and select the less optimal job applicant. So it’s easy to deride
overcon dence as a big societal problem (which it is), but we shouldn’t overlook the reason it’s so
prevalent: It yields real bene ts for the people who exhibit it.

Some of these ndings about the power of con dence could help explain the gender gap in leadership
positions at big rms, since there are studies showing that men tend to pu their egos up more than
women (a fact lamented in the Atlantic article that spawned Brooks’s column, as well as the book it’s
adapted from). This self-deception likely enhances their status.

Would Anderson advise people to be overcon dent? “God, that’s a hard one,” he says. “The truth is, I
keep showing that it bene ts people, but the reason I started studying this is that I was tearing my
hair out watching overcon dent people get ahead.”

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