OVERCONFIDENCE AND WAR: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions

The data show that confidence systematically exceeds accuracy, implying people are more sure that they are correct than they deserve to be.

By contrast, the key finding is that confidence exceeds accuracy so long as the subject is answering hard questions about an unfamiliar topic. In a series where subjects made true-or-false responses to general knowledge statements, they were overconfident at all levels.

Overconfidence and war : the havoc and glory of positive illusions.

One manifestation of the overconfidence effect is the tendency to overestimate one's standing on a dimension of judgment or performance. This subsection of overconfidence focuses on the certainty one feels in their own ability, performance, level of control, or chance of success. This phenomenon is most likely to occur on hard tasks, hard items, when failure is likely or when the individual making the estimate is not especially skilled.

Overestimation has been seen to occur across domains other than those pertaining to one's own performance.

This includes the illusion of control , planning fallacy. Illusion of control describes the tendency for people to behave as if they might have some control when in fact they have none.

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The planning fallacy describes the tendency for people to overestimate their rate of work or to underestimate how long it will take them to get things done. Wishful-thinking effects, in which people overestimate the likelihood of an event because of its desirability, are relatively rare. Overprecision is the excessive confidence that one knows the truth. For reviews, see Harvey or Hoffrage This paradigm, while useful, cannot distinguish overestimation from overprecision; they are one and the same in these item-confidence judgments.

After making a series of item-confidence judgments, if people try to estimate the number of items they got right, they do not tend to systematically overestimate their scores.

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The average of their item-confidence judgments exceeds the count of items they claim to have gotten right. Overplacement is perhaps the most prominent manifestation of the overconfidence effect. Overplacement is a judgment of your performance compared to another. This subsection of overconfidence occurs when people believe themselves to be better than others, or "better-than-average".

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Overplacement more often occurs on simple tasks, ones we believe are easy to accomplish successfully. One explanation for this theory is its ability to self-enhance. For difficult tasks, the effect reverses itself and people believe they are worse than others. Some researchers have claimed that people think good things are more likely to happen to them than to others, whereas bad events were less likely to happen to them than to others. People think common events such as living past 70 are more likely to happen to them than to others, and rare events such as living past are less likely to happen to them than to others.

Taylor and Brown have argued that people cling to overly positive beliefs about themselves, illusions of control, and beliefs in false superiority, because it helps them cope and thrive.

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Overconfidence has been called the most "pervasive and potentially catastrophic" of all the cognitive biases to which human beings fall victim. Strikes, lawsuits, and wars could arise from overplacement. If plaintiffs and defendants were prone to believe that they were more deserving, fair, and righteous than their legal opponents, that could help account for the persistence of inefficient enduring legal disputes. Probably the same thing that led General Custer to cry out to his wildly outnumbered men at Little Big Horn, "Hurrah boys, we've got them!

Once soldiers have committed to battle, positive illusions may in fact help the cause. Napoleon thought morale was precisely three times as important as physical strength. But when it comes to the initial decision to go to war, overconfidence can be a disaster -- especially now that grinding mechanized combat has replaced raids on unsuspecting enemy tribes, which are far less likely to lead to bloody stalemates.

Dominic Johnson

Compounding the problem is that national leaders may be even more inclined to irrational optimism than other humans, since they are by definition strivers who have been victorious in past political struggles. The book's cover shows George W. Bush in the infamous flight suit, giving the thumbs up. Adaptive overconfidence may be the X-factor explaining longstanding historical mysteries surrounding 20th-century conflicts, Johnson argues.

Overconfidence and war : the havoc and glory of positive illusions, Dominic D.P. Johnson

Why did every side in World War I think the conflict would be over in weeks? Why did the French, before the German assault in , place such faith in their Maginot Line? Why did American strategists ignore the French defeat in Vietnam as they stumbled toward a very similar fate? More recently, what led the Bush administration to play down warnings -- as Johnson sees it -- about how difficult the occupation of Iraq would be? He mentions another bias that Johnson doesn't stress: The application of evolutionary psychology to complicated historical events invariably turns off some scholars.

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