The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us (15 page)

Our colleague Brian Scholl, the Yale psychology professor who worked with us on some of the inattentional blindness studies described in
Chapter 1
, tells an anecdote that might shed some light on the reasons why the illusion of confidence is so powerful. In his graduate school days at Rutgers University in New Jersey, he learned to play the ancient and challenging board game Go. Brian found that with some practice, he could beat all of his friends. While visiting New York, he had an opportunity to test his skills against an acquaintance who was a top-notch Go player. To his own surprise, the match was close and he ended up losing by just half a point. He came away from the game with a newfound sense of confidence in his skills. Unfortunately, his confidence came crashing to Earth when he talked with a professor in his department who was an expert Go player. When he described his success against the Go expert, she just shook her head and rolled her eyes. “Brian,” she said, “don’t you know that when a good Go player is facing a much weaker player, they sometimes challenge themselves by trying to win by as few points as possible?”

Brian’s error of ascribing his Go results to his own skill, although reasonable, reflects a general tendency we all have to interpret feedback about our abilities in the most positive possible light. We tend to think that our good performances reflect our superior abilities, while our mistakes are “accidental,” “inadvertent,” or a result of circumstances beyond our control, and we do our best to ignore evidence that contradicts these conclusions. If incompetence and overconfidence are linked, would training incompetent people to be more skilled improve their understanding of their own skill levels? Kruger and Dunning found just that in a later experiment: Teaching the people who did worst on a logical reasoning task to perform the task better significantly (although not completely) reduced their overconfidence. Making people more competent is the way—or at least one way—to make them better judges of their competence.
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The finding that incompetence causes overconfidence is actually reassuring. It tells us that as we study and practice a task, we get better at both performing the task and knowing how well we perform it. Think of it this way: When people start learning a new skill, their skill level is low and their confidence is often higher than it should be—they are overconfident. As their skills improve, their confidence also increases, but at a slower rate, so that eventually, at a high level of skill, their confidence levels are appropriate for their skill levels (or, at least, they are closer to the appropriate levels). The most dangerous kind of overconfidence in our abilities comes not when we are already skilled at a task but when we are still unskilled.

Once you know about this aspect of the illusion of confidence, you can start to pay more attention to what confidence really means, for yourself and for others. If you are just learning a new task, you now know that you should hedge your estimate of how well you are doing. You can also recognize that other people are most likely to be overconfident when they are first learning a task. When your children are learning to drive, they will be more confident of their skill than they should be. Managers who have just been promoted to new positions are likely to display unwarranted certainty in their own actions. And keep in mind that it is gaining real skill in a task, not just doing it more and more, that makes confidence a truer signal of ability. Experience does not guarantee expertise.

Brian Scholl’s Go anecdote shows how we tend to assume the best of our abilities (and the worst of our adversary’s abilities). Unwarranted certainty about our own competence spans ability, gender, and nationality. According to our national survey, 63 percent of Americans consider themselves to be above average in intelligence. Perhaps unsurprisingly, men were more confident in their intelligence than women, with 71 percent judging themselves to be smarter than average. But even among women, significantly more than half—57 percent—thought themselves to be smarter than the average person. This overconfidence isn’t limited to arrogant Americans; according to a recent survey of a representative sample of Canadians, approximately 70 percent considered themselves
“above average” in intelligence too. Nor is this overconfidence a new phenomenon, a reflection of some ambiguity in the concept of intelligence, an artifact of North American narcissism, or an inflated twenty-first-century notion of self-esteem: A 1981 study found that 69 percent of Swedish college students estimated themselves to be superior to 50 percent of their peers in driving ability, and 77 percent believed they were in the top 50 percent in safety. Most people also consider themselves to be above average in attractiveness.
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This illusion of confidence occurs automatically, without our actually reflecting on the situation. Only when direct, incontrovertible evidence forces us to confront our limitations can we see through the illusion. The disillusionment that Brian Scholl experienced after learning that he’d been played by the Go expert forced him to recalibrate his beliefs in his own skills, diminishing his overconfidence. If Brian kept playing Go, his ability would improve and his level of confidence would move closer to his level of skill. Competence helps to dispel the illusion of confidence. The key, though, is having definitive evidence of your own skills—you have to become good enough at what you do to recognize your own limitations.

We don’t want you to think we believe that people are nothing but bluster and bravado, always overstating their abilities and trying to deceive others. In fact, people who are highly skilled occasionally suffer from the opposite problem. Almost all of the new teachers or professors we have met, especially those who achieved some early success in their careers, are convinced that they are fooling people—that they aren’t really as good as people think they are.
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Recall Kruger and Dunning’s humor experiment. We didn’t tell you this before, but the subjects in the top 25 percent in sense of humor didn’t fully realize how good their senses of humor were—they actually
underestimated
the number of their peers who were less funny.
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Overconfidence is more common—and more dangerous—but underconfidence like this does exist.

The combination of incompetence and overconfidence gives us hilarious stories of stupid criminals and entertaining video clips of deluded
American Idol
aspirants, but misplaced confidence can have more insidious effects as well. Western society places extraordinary value on individual self-confidence; a life lived without confidence is not a worthy life. David Baird’s self-help book
A Thousand Paths to Confidence
begins by declaring, “Every moment of our life is absolutely precious and is not to be wasted in self-doubt. The wish to be confident and to live life with confidence is the vital first step. If you are prepared to take it, congratulate yourself—you have begun your journey on the path to confidence.”
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A popular business book by Harvard professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter, not coincidentally titled
Confidence
, argues that maintaining confidence perpetuates winning streaks, while losing it can trigger losing streaks, and that “confidence shapes the outcomes of many contests of life—from simple ball games to complex enterprises, from individual performance to national culture.”
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The central premise of the Albert Brooks movie
Defending Your Life
is that only those who acted confidently while they were alive can proceed to the next level in the afterlife. The power of confidence pervades parenting advice as well, with a recent cover story in
Parents
magazine offering tips on how to “raise a confident child,” promising “the most effective ways to help your child become happy, self-assured, and successful.”
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Actress Tina Fey echoed this sentiment upon accepting an Emmy Award for her television comedy
30 Rock:
“I thank my parents for somehow raising me to have confidence that is disproportionate with my looks and abilities. Well done. That is what all parents should do.”

President Jimmy Carter thought that confidence had even broader significance. On national television in July 1979 he gave his most famous presidential speech, in which he reported the grave lesson he had learned from a series of private meetings with politicians, businesspeople, clergy, and other citizens. After quoting nineteen of these people (including, though without attribution, first-term Arkansas
governor Bill Clinton), many of whom were sharply critical of his leadership and gloomy about the country’s economic prospects, he diagnosed the problem not as one of politics or policy, but of psychology:

The president was especially troubled by polls that suggested “a majority of people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years,” and by what he perceived as growing consumerism and disrespect for traditional institutions. He went on to propose a series of new energy-related policies intended to gradually reduce the country’s use of imported oil. Whether or not his diagnosis of America’s mood was correct, and regardless of whether changing energy sources was the right prescription, after an initially positive reaction and an 11-percent jump in his job-approval ratings, many commentators assailed Carter for seemingly blaming the government’s failings on the people.
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This speech became known as the “malaise speech” because of comments Clark Clifford, a Democratic party wise man, had made to journalists before the speech about what he perceived to be Carter’s concerns about the country. Carter’s pollster, Patrick Cadell, had also used the word in a memo to the president that was later leaked to the press. Ironically, Carter never once used the word “malaise,” but he did mention “confidence” fifteen times. In his mind, a sort of collective self-confidence was the key ingredient in the recipe for the nation’s success.

Time and again, people embrace certainty and reject tentativeness, whether in their own beliefs and memories, the counsel of an adviser, the testimony of a witness, or the speech of a leader during a crisis. Indeed, we pay great attention to confidence—in ourselves, our leaders, and those around us—particularly when the facts or the future are uncertain. In the 1980s, the investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert and its star
financier Michael Milken were able to catalyze hostile corporate takeovers merely by claiming in a letter to be “highly confident” that they could raise the necessary funds.
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Before they invented the aptly named “highly confident letter,” Milken and his colleagues had to spend weeks or months making financial arrangements, work that might prove wasted if the deal didn’t go through. Expressing their confidence in advance turned out to be just as effective—not to mention faster and cheaper—once Drexel and Milken’s reputations preceded them into battle.

According to journalist Bob Woodward, in late 2002 President George W. Bush had doubts about launching an invasion of Iraq, so he asked CIA director George Tenet directly about the strength of the evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. Tenet said, “It’s a slam dunk case!” Bush repeated, “George, how confident are you?” Tenet’s reply: “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk!” Weeks into the war, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer expressed “high confidence” that weapons of mass destruction would yet be found. As of this writing, they are still missing, and an exhaustive government investigation has concluded that they were not there to be found.
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Why does confidence have such a hold on us? Why do we have such an overwhelming and often unnoticed inclination to take another person’s outward confidence as an honest signal of his or her inner knowledge, ability, and resolve? As we have seen, the most incompetent among us tend to be the most overconfident, yet we still rely on confidence as an indicator of ability.

Imagine being asked to work together with three other people—call them Jane, Emily, and Megan—to solve challenging math problems. You don’t know who in your group is good at math; you have only your (imperfect) knowledge of your own abilities. On the first problem, Jane is the first to suggest an answer, and Emily chimes in with her own thoughts. Megan is initially quiet, but after a while, she comes up with
the correct answer and explains why the other answers were wrong. This happens several times, so it becomes clear to all that Megan is good at solving problems like these. The group comes to defer to her as their de facto leader, and it does very well on its task. In an ideal world, group dynamics would always work this way: The cream would rise to the top; all members would contribute their unique knowledge, skills, and competence; and group deliberation would lead to better decisions. But the reality of group performance too often diverges from this ideal.

Chris once interviewed a U.S. government intelligence agent about group decision processes. The agent described a method his group sometimes used to arrive at a shared estimate for an unknown quantity: The members went around the room, each giving his or her own estimate,
in descending order of seniority.
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Imagine the false sense of consensus and confidence that cascades through a group when one person after another confirms the boss’s original guess. Although each staff member could have offered an independent, unbiased, uninfluenced opinion by secret ballot, the chances of that happening in practice are virtually nil. The very process of putting individuals together to deliberate before they reach a conclusion almost guarantees that the group’s decision will
not
be the product of independent opinions and contributions. Instead, it will be influenced by group dynamics, personality conflicts, and other social factors that have little to do with who knows what, and why they know it.