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2016-04-29 09:04:43
Heidi Grant Halvorson
April 19, 2016
Even in a presidential campaign filled with startling soundbites, this one stands out: I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn t lose any voters, Donald Trump told a group of Iowa supporters.
A recent article in Politico described Trump as the American Silvio Berlusconi, the flamboyant and controversial former Italian prime minister who once referred to himself publicly as the best political leader in Europe and in the world.
More recent (but clearly in the same spirit) was the eye-opening comment made by infamous pharma bro Martin Shkreli, best known for raising the price of a drug prescribed to newborn babies and AIDS patients from $13.50 per pill to $750. After a hostile Congressional hearing, he took to an online chat room to boast, You cannot troll the greatest troll who ever lived.
Whether you call it guts or hubris, men like Trump, Berlusconi, and Shkreli certainly do not suffer from a lack of confidence. In fact, their striking and sustained overconfidence is the sort of thing that has puzzled research psychologists for decades.
How does such overconfidence persist? As evolutionary biologist Dominic Johnson and political scientist James Fowler note in a 2011 Nature article, overconfidence leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. When reality intervenes, as it inevitably will, logic dictates that a comeuppance is in order.
And yet this doesn t happen. Thus Trump blames his failure (so far) to secure the GOP nomination on a system he now describes as rigged and phony. Shkreli, after smirkingly pleading the Fifth during his Congressional hearing, called the representatives who interrogated him imbeciles. And Berlusconi, never to be outdone, once referred to himself as the Jesus Christ of politics, persecuted unfairly by the cancerous growth that is the Italian Judiciary. In fact, so confident did he remain even during the 2011 investigation into underage prostitution charges related to his infamous bunga bunga parties that he joked, When asked if they would like to have sex with me, 30% of women said yes, while the other 70% replied, What, again?
Why do the overconfident remain blissfully ignorant of their own limitations?
New research has finally begun to shed light on that puzzle. Social psychologists Joyce Ehrlinger, Ainsley Mitchum, and Carol Dweck thought that the answer might lie in the implicit beliefs that overconfident people hold about the malleability of character and ability. Decades of research by Dweck and others has shown that some people see personality and intelligence as relatively fixed (i.e., you are born a certain way and there isn t much you can do about it), while other believe them to be malleable, capable of changing and developing with effort and experience.
These beliefs have profound consequences for how we see ourselves and others and how we learn (or don t). For instance, people with a fixed mindset tend to be much more interested in proving or showing that they are smart, rather than pursuing opportunities to get smarter.
Ehrlinger and her colleagues theorized that overconfidence might be another overlooked aspect of fixed mindset thinking. In their studies, students solved a set of problems that varied in difficulty. Before learning their score, students were asked to guess how well they had done. Fixed mindset students were indeed overconfident their estimates were more than 25% higher than their actual scores. Those students who believed their abilities to be malleable (i.e., growth mindset ) overestimated their performance by only 5%. It seems that if you believe your abilities are fixed, that belief motivates you to inflate those abilities.
To figure out why this overestimation of ability persists, however, Ehrlinger and her team had to dig a bit deeper. When they looked at how the students tackled the test, they realized that the fixed mindset students had spent more time working on the easier problems and less time on the harder ones. In other words, they d selectively attended to the problems that reinforced their overconfidence confirming their high opinion of themselves and ignoring everything else as much as possible. Pride doesn t just come before a fall; pride is what trips you in the first place.
This pattern fits with other research on fixed mindsets, which associate them with a host of unfortunate consequences. People who believe that ability is immutable are more likely to avoid difficulty, to withdraw effort in the face of setbacks, and to react defensively when challenged. They are more likely to rush to judgment and think stereotypically, are more vengeful after a conflict, and are more punitive toward transgressors.
Moreover, the best evidence we have suggests that these people are wrong our personalities and abilities are not fixed. This is not to say that nothing about a person is stable over time, but longitudinal studies of personality traits have found the traits to vary considerably with age, just as IQ scores have been found to jump when test takers are exposed to richer learning environments. Yes, there are limits, but people can and do change with effort and experience.
It s worth acknowledging that under the right circumstances overconfidence can also have benefits. Some studies, for instance, show that overconfident people tend to have higher status and that other people (at least in the short term) see them as more capable. Johnson and Fowler argued, with compelling evidence, that when the relative cost of throwing your hat in the ring is low and the potential gains are high, overconfidence provides an evolutionary advantage. (Think of a particularly unimpressive male peacock strutting his stuff before a potential mate even trying is an act of overconfidence, but what is there to for him to lose?)
So perhaps overconfidence persists for as long as it does in people like Trump, Berlusconi, and Shkreli at least in part because the rest of us allow them to get away with it. We confuse blustering arrogance with genuine ability. As Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic warns in his excellent book Confidence, there is no better way to be wrong about another person s competence than in judging them by their confidence. (You know how all giraffes are mammals but not all mammals are giraffes? In the same vein, people with high ability are usually confident but most confident people don t actually deserve to be.)
Instead of using confidence as a quick and easy indicator of expertise, we need to do the mental heavy lifting of looking at a person s track record of ideas and accomplishments when deciding whom to hire or invest with, or (heaven help us) who should run our country. Just because the overconfident never seem to learn doesn t mean the rest of us shouldn t.
Heidi Grant Halvorson, Ph.D. is associate director for the Motivation Science Center at the Columbia University Business School and author of the bestselling Nine Things Successful People Do Differently. Her latest book is No One Understands You and What to Do About It, which has been featured in national and international media. Dr. Halvorson is available for speaking and training. She s on Twitter @hghalvorson.