Overconfidence

Do I know as much as I think I know' As humans we tend to overestimate our worth in terms of knowledge, poise, performance and in many other aspects; and we underestimate the value of our opponents who could be our competitors, our environment and other external factors. This is possibly one of the main reasons why we might get more offended by negative criticism. In many instances, we use a heuristic approach to doing things, where we miscalculate processes, which eventually results in inaccurate subsequent outcomes. Last month I had applied for a scholarship at the university. I knew that there was only one other student who had applied for the same award. I took it for granted that the award was ‘made for me’ and I had all the credentials to receive it, so I gave little attention to the details of my application and submitted it, overflowing with optimism. The results came out 3 days ago, and it turned out that the other guy got the award. I had overestimated my potential and underestimated all the external factors that played a huge effect on the outcome. The most important takeaway I got from this was to identify what went wrong and how I could prevent this from happening again. I should’ve ensured that I accounted for all the extreme possibilities, rather than focussing only on my optimism and surety of my calculations. I should’ve also paid more heed to the process of applying and ensuring that it was up to standard, rather than assume the possible outcome. Eventually, I was the one who lost out in the process. The effect of over-confidence could fall on people around us as well. Convincing people of something you think you are absolutely sure about could be risky because we might think we know, but little do we know of how much we know. People might stop believing us if we were to repeatedly make the wrong judgments. Therefore, it is always useful to take others’ comments with “a pinch of salt”, i.e. not to blindly believe what others have to say. On another note, a different stream of overconfidence is when we tend to be biased towards our beliefs and not look at the other side of the coin. For instance, the conspiracy theories that surrounded the 9/11 attacks were extremely biased in that the people behind these theories saw only the intricate patterns that favoured their beliefs, and didn’t look at the flaws in their viewpoints. This demonstrates that the confidence in one’s knowledge is higher than the confidence in others’ knowledge or viewpoints. This tends to make people narrow-minded and not use further information to help make or change decisions. The use of the Bayesian theory to make decisions could be extremely useful as it would prevent us from stagnating with our decisions based on perception of our own knowledge, when instead we could improve our outcomes based on new, updated information. How many times have your friends said to you, “I knew that would happen!”' This is when they express their supposed viewpoint after the event has happened, presumably expecting it to have happened beforehand. This is a natural human tendency where we assume we know the answer before we are told. This aggravates the belief that we are always right and might also prevent us from asking questions. There is no doubt that overconfidence is required in a lot of industries and professions such as the sales and marketing industry where it is the key in trying to secure deals. In other professions, it is extremely important to know where to draw the line between being confident and being over-confident. Being sure of one’s self is a good thing, however being too sure, without taking into account the outside factors might prove to be a bad idea. We must value others’ opinions and not be blinded by our apparent possession of knowledge. More importantly, never underestimate your ‘opponent’.