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A new study has come out showing that humans prefer cockiness to expertise. The Times of India welcomed this news with its normal scientific rigour:

Your astrologer may not always be bang on target while predicting your future, but you still tend to pay him regular visits, all because of the confidence with which he discusses things with you.

Joking aside, this study - which I must confess I haven’t read, although I have printed it off, which is pretty much the same thing in my book - seem to raise the issue Malcolm Gladwell commented on recently. Gladwell argued that confidence would almost inevitably lead to overconfidence, and that this was most likely an evolutionary adaptation,

… because appearing “bigger and stronger” than you really are keeps you from being attacked.

Over on Stumbling and Mumbling, Chris Dillow has a different view. Citing the case of a trader who starts to think the market might turn bearish when he has spent months betting the other way, Dillow suggests that the desire to appear competent might encourage the trader to ignore his information and stick with his previous position:

To an outsider, our trader looks like he’s committing some combination of the confirmation bias or over-confidence. But in fact, he’s acting rationally, maximizing his expected utility.

For my money - not very much, as you know - both positions are dubious because their groundings - evolutionary psychology and rational choice theory respectively - offer such impoverished views of what we might call human nature. But Gladwell and Dillow only differ over the mechanism. When it comes to the inevitability of overconfidence, they’re on the same side - the side I like to think of as my side.

Most of the attention given to this report has focused on the way louder voices crowd out sane ones - an issue the brilliant Peggy Noonan looked at recently. But this is a sideshow. The real question concerns a certain father-of-two in the United States, and the immense confidence he exhibits when dealing effectively and efficiently with any number of impossible challenges.

Will Obama succumb to overconfidence? Watch David Brooks wrestle with his beliefs, and come to no firm conclusion, in this interesting interview.

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