Overconfidence

In class we discussed about the overconfidence factor, and how people are sometimes very sure of themselves on a certain topic. Yet, we learn later that they are in fact totally wrong and even they themselves were surprised to be wrong. A good example I believe is a test in the FBI, which students sit in a classroom and are learning a topic as their professor speaks. When someone walks into the class and grabs a book from one of the bookshelves. A day later they might be asked what that person was wearing, what color hair they have, what book they took etc. It is surprising to see the results and then ask the participants how sure they were of their answers. The correlation between their confidence and the amount they got correct about the person is of great variance. The point being that even a roomful of very intelligent people may be very confident about something, when in fact they are totally wrong about a lot of the questions asked of them. The same goes for any regular person in society. It could be lack of preparation for an exam because the individual feels like know the material well enough. Then they get their results for the test and are very surprised to discover they didn’t do so well. It is something that everyone experiences but we must control it to the best of our ability.