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The title seems a bit misleading. Humans don't prefer cockiness to expertise, they just have a hard time differentiating between the two.
by ccc3 17y ago
The 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.
- kragen 17y agoTentative conclusions can be a sign of lack of information, too. Nuanced conclusions can equally well be a sign of spending a lot of time explaining the conclusion as of expertise.
- kragen 17y agoWhat the article said was that when people had the opportunity to observe both confidence and expertise, they preferred buying advice from advisors who were more confident and advisors who were more expert, but the confidence effect was much larger. In other words, even when they had ample evidence with which to differentiate, they went with their biologically programmed attraction to confidence rather than their rational assessment of expertise. I'm vulnerable to it too; I just added an extremist Libertarian as a friend on Facebook, because they're just so enjoyable to talk to.
- joe_the_user 17y ago"Humans"? This was one study of students playing a particular game in a modern American university. The jump to "(all) humans" seems unjustified. But suppose the researcher might have wanted to show the effect of cockiness.
- kragen 17y agoHeh. Well, I agree that it's premature to generalize definitively to humans in general, and this is a problem with psychology experiments in general: any particular experiment is necessarily very restricted in scope, and generally N is very small, so it's hard to have confidence in anything more than simple linear models. Occam's razor suggests that it's more likely, given this one data point, that it's true of all people than that it's only true of the people that happened to be in the sample. But that clearly doesn't justify holding that view very strongly; it's based on a small amount of evidence.