Overconfidence Effect
We are excessively confident in our own abilities and knowledge.
The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. Overconfidence has been called 'the mother of all psychological biases' and is particularly dangerous in domains with delayed or ambiguous feedback, such as long-term investing, medicine, and geopolitical forecasting.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Everyday life Driving Confidence Studies consistently show 80-90% of drivers rate themselves as above average, a statistical impossibility.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
Olivia argues passionately about a political issue on social media, certain her view is correct, without having read any of the linked sources.
Laura feels her intuitive grasp of the data is more reliable than the formal statistical analysis presented in the report.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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