Where Should You Place Your Confidence?
I receive about six different news updates in my email every day, and each seems to be trying to outdo the others with catchy and sometimes amusing (or misleading) headlines. Yesterday, the headline for one of them was, “90 percent of life is confidence”— a quote from an anime series I’ve not yet watched. That does sound good, and wouldn’t life be easy if that were true? In my courses I talk frequently about the importance of confidence; yet the headline made me think about all the ways confidence, and overconfidence, can lead us to suboptimal outcomes and how perhaps we can avoid this by refocusing where we place our confidence.
With a general feeling of embarrassment, I look back on periods of my life where I was certain I had a skill well wired, and now, many years later, I realize I’m still struggling to master that same skill—my “mastery” of French being a great example. My initial confidence was unmerited, though it did serve me well as I explored Paris unencumbered by the reality that very few people had any idea what I was saying.
I’m sure many of you are familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with a limited set of knowledge in a given domain greatly overestimate their abilities in that domain. A little knowledge creates an unjustified sense of confidence in our abilities, and we lack the knowledge or discernment to be aware of our deficiencies. As we gain further knowledge, we become better aware, through the process of metacognition, of what we don’t know and, subsequently, our confidence begins to lower toward an appropriate equilibrium. The irony is that the most skilled of us tend to have a somewhat lower confidence in our abilities. That is, objectively, those highly skilled individuals feel they are less skilled than they are.
Overconfidence bias is similar. We all feel we know a lot of things. We feel confident in our knowledge and make important decisions based on that knowledge and our confidence in it. Yet, many studies show that despite our high confidence, our knowledge base generally is not as accurate as we believe. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky defined this overconfidence as “the difference between mean confidence and overall accuracy” (Kahneman and Tversky, 1996). This has been highlighted repeatedly in the medical field where physicians have a 10-15 percent error rate in diagnoses despite near 100 percent confidence estimates. Physicians spend years in medical school and residencies; rightfully, they are confident in their abilities. Yet, many fail to update and recalibrate their knowledge base over time and thus misdiagnose based on overconfidence.
The following exercise helps us comprehend how we simplify our understanding of the world and how this leads us to believe we know far more than we do. If you try to draw a can opener and then compare that drawing to an actual can opener, you will almost without fail find that you have notably oversimplified the mechanisms of a can opener. You think you know much more than you do about this simple object. Now think about how much you really know about an incredibly complex coronavirus, or the history and geopolitics involved when one country invades another—say Russia and Ukraine.
One other area of overconfidence I want to touch on is confident self-talk, such as “I can do this.” At times, this can serve us well. If I’m on the edge of doing something, and going back isn’t an option, telling myself, “I can’t do this,” certainly will not be helpful. To get through a challenge, I need to believe I can get through it. The problem comes in the preparatory stages. As I’m practicing and preparing, and I tell myself, “I’m great at this,” my brain can’t distinguish between my aspiration to become great and the statement, “I am great.” Thus, from my brain’s point of view there is no need to put in any further effort. As far as it is concerned, because that is what I’ve told it, I’m already great at this thing and no further effort is needed.
What is important is focusing not on the outcome but on the path to the desired outcome. If we focus our confidence on the process of achieving, rather than the outcome, our brain adjusts and provides the necessary drive to become great rather than believing we already are great. And, as I’ve said before, equally important to focusing on the process is entering into the effort with the confidence that you will learn from whatever mistakes come your way. In other words, where we focus our confidence is what matters. “I can complete this practice or read this complicated paper” and “I can learn from mistakes,” rather than “I’m awesome at this and there will be no mistakes.”
When it comes to our overconfidence biases, actively reflecting on what we don’t know or where we might be wrong is also beneficial. Can you, with confidence (and accuracy), say in what year Ukraine gained its independence? Or try something more complex, such as, how does a coronavirus replicate? Question what you don’t know and consider how you are oversimplifying something that in reality is complex. Put confidence in your ability to question rather than your ability to know. This leads to better decision making and to better knowing.
Everyone wants to be and to feel confident, which is great. Consider, though, where you are placing your confidence. If we focus our confidence on the process, rather than on our knowledge and an outcome, the actual outcome will be far better.
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For further insight into the Dunning-Kruger effect, check out this meta-analysis. For further on physician overconfidence, see this insightful article published in the journal Nature. And if you are interested in a detailed discussion of the can opener effect, have a read through this article.
