6 ms·
Humans prefer cockiness to expertise
- tokenadult 17y ago"The findings add weight to the idea that if offering expert opinion is your stock-in-trade, it pays to appear confident." What implications does this have for online discussion? P.S. after edit: I've related before one observational study of men picking up women in bars. When the men were prompted to act "confident," they had limited luck in getting dates. When they were told to act "arrogant" they had much better success. That's rather dismaying to me in what it says about women. I don't know if this result has been replicated (he said, to be honest at the expense of looking confident).
- pierrefar 17y agoI guess "I don't know" is a bad answer to your question.
- req2 17y agoWhat about "I'd google it"?
- johnm 17y agoNot just online... It leads to dishonest, non-candid discussion. "Better" to attack with ad hominem; wild; fallacy filled; etc. "arguments" than to show any human authenticity.
- jcromartie 17y agoThat explains the popularity of talk radio.
- anamax 17y ago> I've related before one observational study of men picking up women in bars. When the men were prompted to act "confident," they had limited luck in getting dates. When they were told to act "arrogant" they had much better success. That's rather dismaying to me in what it says about women. I think that it says something about what many men think "acting confident" means. It also says that you have to boost the signal in a noisy environment.
- bjelkeman-again 17y agoYou see this affect the way start-ups are being pitched as well. Cocky sales pitches are preferred over cautious or realistic pitches (even if the buyer says otherwise). So be cocky and back it up with expertise when they start digging. :D
- dschobel 17y agoIt sounds crazy but I've seen this in action. At my last job they brought in a guy who was unmitigated disaster for a technical leadership position. In short, he was the most arrogant, buzz-word filled SOB I ever had the displeasure of meeting, After he finally got booted when people realized he didn't know a damn thing about technology I flat out asked the VP of engineering: "What did you ever see in him?". He said: "You know, you're going to think I'm crazy, but he was exactly the same in the interview as he was around here daily, and I really thought that cockiness would mean he would take the lead on issues and be able to guide the younger guys". So remember that kids, if you want to be seen as leadership material, thoughtfulness and pensiveness are not the way to go about it. Just look at CTOs at companies you respect for further proof and see how many timid figures you find.
- kungfooey 17y agoIt doesn't sound crazy at all. This (particularly in the software development world) is exactly the sort of situation I had in mind when I read and posted the article. It seems to be a particularly acute problem in an industry where those responsible for who gets promoted know little about the technology involved.
- dkarl 17y agoSome guys who are cocky like that are insanely driven to justify their cockiness. I'm sure that's exactly what your VP was looking for: a classic driven, workaholic, alpha male executive. This is an interesting topic from a geeky point of view, since geeks tend to be the opposite of cocky guys like this. Geeks tend to be meek and have bad posture and avoid boasting. The downside of this is that some geeks manage to avoid ever being in a position where they have to stretch themselves to live up to their boasting. Competition and arrogance drive a lot of achievement.
- grandalf 17y agothis is an excellent point. At least if someone is confident and then wrong you can learn not to trust them. Someone who always hedges may never be quite as wrong, but is far less useful to a manager. In an organizational structure it's not about one person being right, it's about the organization making a decision.
- ccc3 17y agoThe title seems a bit misleading. Humans don't prefer cockiness to expertise, they just have a hard time differentiating between the two.
- bombarolo 17y agoThese two are inversely proportional in most cases.
- maneesh 17y agoI definitely disagree w/ that, there are a lot of cocky arrogant people who are also extremely smart too. It's just about finding the balance.
- brlewis 17y agoI think there are a lot of reasonably smart cocky/arrogant people. I think there are hardly any extremely smart ones. But there are plenty of ones that people think are extremely smart, due to the phenomenon this article describes. Arrogance hinders people from getting smarter.
- tokenadult 17y agoHumans don't prefer cockiness to expertise, they just have a hard time differentiating between the two. If human beings can't recognize nuanced, tentative conclusions as a sign of expertise, they definitely have a problem.
- falsestprophet 17y agoIf human beings can't recognize nuanced, tentative conclusions as a sign of expertise, they definitely have a problem. Well, I can recognize this statement as an unsubstituted, cocky declaration rather than a nuanced, tentative conclusion.
- lallysingh 17y agoSmall adjustment: Humans definitely have a problem because they can't recognize nuanced, tentative conclusions as a sign of expertise.
- adrianwaj 17y agoBarack Obama's cocky, wouldn't one say? Good in times of uncertainty and change.
- tezza 17y agoAnd Scientific Researchers prefer topics that grab headlines to more worthy research. From :: http://www.twin-research.ac.uk/publications.html http://www.twin-research.ac.uk/publications.html Research:: * Emotional intelligence and its association with orgasmic frequency in women Result :: * Metro.co.uk :: Intelligent women enjoy more sex http://www.metro.co.uk/metrosexual/article.html?Intelligent_women_enjoy_more_sex&in_article_id=656133&in_page_id=8 http://www.metro.co.uk/metrosexual/article.html?Intelligent_...
- pj 17y agoI suppose it is just going to get worse and worse. We will see run away selection if women continue to choose arrogance over substance.
- gcheong 17y agoAn arrogantocracy?
- nostrademons 17y agoWell, usually what happens is that there's some cataclysmic event where reality intervenes and says "Uh, no, you actually don't know what you're talking about." Then all the arrogant folks die off (or permanently lose credibility) and get replaced by folks who were right all along but were more quiet about it. We're seeing this in the newspaper industry (all the sensationalist, content-free papers are dying off because we can get sensationalist, content-free news free off the Internet) and the financial industry (all the folks who thought unlimited leverage and perpetual debt spending was a good thing are getting squeezed mighty hard by deflation, even though the government is doing its best to bail them out). Meanwhile, geekdom is becoming increasingly sexier, as women realize that geeks have the goods and the suits just have the sparkle.
- DenisM 17y ago>usually what happens is that there's some cataclysmic event Don't look now, but the whole of economy is not in a great shape.
- aswanson 17y agoThose selections come back to bite them in the ass ungodly hard, though. They usually get abused and/or dumped (post pregrancy) by such chaps, so there is a dampening effect on this selection for the progeny as they are raised without the support of a caring father.
- edw519 17y agoAccording to Webster: cockiness: boldly or brashly self-confident confidence: a: a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances <had perfect confidence in her ability to succeed> <met the risk with brash confidence> b: faith or belief that one will act in a right, proper, or effective way <have confidence in a leader> Big difference. On many technical issues, confidence is necessary but not sufficient. Cockiness, OTOH, is often used when confidence doesn't exist (see "poser").
- polos 17y agoYes, humans are very superficial, most of the time.
- petercooper 17y agoI've seen a lot of this in the programming world. Certain ideas/libraries/techniques will be created and professed so emphatically by their proponent that people accept them as gospel and "the right way." In reality, they're no better (or are sometimes worse) than the alternatives (testing framework, "best practices/agile", and source control standpoints are recent such issues). I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, since overly confident people can often be stretched into living up to their claims and genius can often result from that. I'd actually consider David Heinemeier Hansson an example of this. He has admitted his lack of experience when he started programming in Ruby and building Rails (as part of Basecamp) but his emphatic delivery of its benefits back in 2004 led to him picking up followers, gaining marketshare, learning a lot and becoming the genuinely gifted visionary we have today.
- gcheong 17y agoGenuine confidence comes from expertise gained by experience which is probably why, when people rely on information from a person with expertise that they do not possess themselves, confident experts are preferred over hesitant ones. However, like all cognitive shortcuts, it is not a perfect proxy.
- haseman 17y agoThis further validates my longstanding theory that the winner of any argument won't be the person who's right, it'll be the person who thinks they are right the most.
- mfeif 17y agoWitness the GOP and followers.
- dschobel 17y agoHave you ever seen Ann Coulter in action? It's amazing how far you get on fervent belief + debate skills.
- steve_mobs 17y agoi guess fox news has got the formula down. you for forgot bill oreilly.
- anamax 17y agoArguments aren't intended to find out who is correct.
- brlewis 17y agoLove the subtle self-referential joke at the end.
- SwellJoe 17y agoAgreed. I laughed out loud at the punchline. Scientists are sometimes hilarious.
- nostrademons 17y agoFeynman wrote about this in The Meaning of it All - he thought one of the major problems with American society today (1960s) was that people could no longer distinguish confidence and expertise. The media has to have an answer for everything, even if that answer was a total guess. He thought that people ought to look much more favorably upon someone who says "I don't know, but I know how to find out" over someone who says "This is the answer, but I can't tell you how I got it."
- jfarmer 17y agoHas that ever been the case?
- nostrademons 17y agoMuch of the Enlightenment was centered around that ideal - that authority figures do not have all the answers, but reason provides us with a means to figure them out. And it turned out to be quite successful - it brought us modern science, and evidence-based medicine, and the industrial revolution, and most of the progress of the last four centuries.
- mleonhard 17y agoDid you write that first and then look it up to see if it is correct?
- dangrover 17y agoReminds me of this from Creating Passionate Users: http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/06/glibwin.jpg http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/06/...
- auston 17y agoI don't see what most people commenting here do? The "guessers" here were not given an option to see the "advisers" previous track record / experience - how can they prefer one to the other if they are only given the "advisers" confidence level?
- tybris 17y agoThat's sad, but also a bit black & white. People can be cocky and have expertise.
- WilliamLP 17y agoThe corollary to this is that if you actually _do_ know better than the people around you, you should act like an arrogant SOB or you're just going to get ignored. Having learned this I've seen an improvement in all areas of life, except that people don't like me on internet forums much:)
- anamax 17y agoIn many cases, folks have no basis for judging expertise. However, they often need to make decisions. When someone says "I know", there are three possibilities. They do know, they don't and they're lying, and they don't know but don't know that they don't know. Many people think that they can pick out liars, so they're only tricked by folks who don't know what they don't know. When someone says that they don't know, there are also three possibilities. They actually don't know, they actually do know and are lying, and they actually do know but don't know that they know. However, there's a big "why bother" here. Lying doesn't make any sense and if they're wrong about what they know, how are they going to help you decide when to believe them?
- ahoyhere 17y agoAnyone who lives in the world of human society knows that this is true, regardless of the linkbait title, because nobody can know everything and that confidence is one of the few metrics everyone can assess. Human nature doesn't change.
- kragen 17y agoIn the experiment, people actually had information about expertise.
- chengas123 17y agoThe guy who did this research was probably the best professor I've ever had. He taught a negotiation class in my MBA program and for every single negotiation tactic you could think of, he had a movie clip that demonstrated it. Class was always entertaining.