Talk:Overconfidence effect

The human tendency to be more confident in one's behaviours, attributes and physical characteristics than one ought to be.

Assuming "bad" drivers have more of an emotional impact than "good" ones, shouldn't the statistic on driving take into account the Von Restorff effect?

Rāga man 05:07, 28 March 2007 (UTC)

I think the section about depressives being more accurate/less overconfident may be in error. See the link. http://psp.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/24/8/880 Depressive Symptoms and Accuracy in the Prediction of Future Events J. Sidney Shrauger, State University of New York-Buffalo Eric Mariano, State University of New York-Buffalo Todd J. Walter, University of Florida

In two studies, the authors examined the accuracy of dysphoric and nondysphoric individuals' predictions about their future behavior. Participants predicted the occurrence of a variety of everyday events and reported on their occurrence over a period of either 4 (Study 1) or 8 (Study 2) weeks. As expected, dysphoria was unrelated to overall accuracy, but nondysphorics tended to be more accurate in making optimistic predictions and dysphorics tended to be more accurate in making pessimistic predictions. These differences were related to differences between the two dysphoric groups in base rates of reported outcome occurrence and certainty of judgments. The findings did not support depressive realism, the negative biasing effect of dysphoria on future predictions, or the contention that dysphorics are less accurate because they predict either more atypical or overly optimistic outcomes. I'm not a psychologist, but perhaps someone can make a better judgment on this. I happened across the link while looking into depressiona d overconfidence. Kenckar 00:07, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Merge with another article?
The bias discussed in this article is precisely the same as is discussed in the article titled Lake Wobegon Effect (and which is known in at least some of the psychology literature as Superiority Bias, which would seem to be a better title for the article. I can't see at present a justification for having the two separate articles. MartinPoulter (talk) 18:07, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Having thought a bit more, I take this back. Two distinct biases are being discussed. It's just that at present the articles are too similar. One bias, superiority bias or Lake Wobegon Effect, is the propensity for people to see themselves as possessing positive attributes to a greater extent than they actually have. One sense of "Overconfidence" is a bias towards seeing favourable events as more likely and unfavourable events as less likely than they really are. Another more common sense of overconfidence is having miscalibrated judgements of likelihood, for example being "90% certain" of judgements which are in fact true only 60% of the time. This article is a good start on an entry about the first kind of overconfidence, but it cites the Swenson study which demonstrates superiority bias rather than overconfidence. I'll think more, and maybe get back to sort this out. MartinPoulter (talk) 17:44, 12 December 2007 (UTC)

I've had more time to come back to this: WP has three articles about superiority bias/illusory superiority: this article, Lake Wobegon effect and Dunning-Kruger effect. All of these have major flaws as encyclopedia articles. It's potentially very misleading for an encyclopedia to have an article on superiority bias labelled as overconfidence, as in psychology overconfidence is something different, as I describe in previous comments. I will have a day working on WP on Tuesday 27th May: I will try to sort these issues out then.MartinPoulter (talk) 13:08, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Politics and overconfidence
Someone has in the last few days removed a comment about overconfidence's relevance to politics (people overestimating their likelihood of being rich rather than poor, hence the potential for a bias against policies that favour the poor). The edit comment was "unreferenced statement that seemed to attempt to pathologise certain political viewpoints - highly inappropriate". I'm not the author of that paragraph, and I think it belongs in another article anyway, but the "pathologise certain political viewpoints" comment is misguided and would prevent almost any discussion of bias. Bias is the norm in human psychology. It's not a pathology per se, so to claim there is a bias that favours a particular view is not to put that view down to pathology. One could probably find biases that favour of opposing viewpoints. Daniel Kahneman argued that biases favour military solutions That doesn't in itself mean that being in favour of war is pathological, although it does give us a reason to be particularly wary of arguments that claim to justify war.MartinPoulter (talk) 22:37, 4 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I believe this statements hits on something pretty good. I see that among the 9/11 "truther" movement, that these people exhibit all of the negative aspects this article points out. More research ought to be done, of course, as mine's an opinion and nothing more. Coffee5binky (talk) 17:57, 18 September 2009 (UTC)

Original research?
The article's terminology of "overprecision", "overestimation" and "overplacement" isn't anything I've seen in the sources, although I've not read all of them. In fact the distinction between Overestimation and Overprecision seems not to make any sense. I'm not sure, but this looks like original research, as does the linking of Illusion of control to overconfidence. MartinPoulter (talk) 11:18, 25 October 2011 (UTC)


 * The terminology is established in Moore and Healy (2008), one of the key, more recent (and highly cited) reviews on overconfidence.
 * Moore, D. A., and P. J. Healy. 2008. The trouble with overconfidence. Psychological Review 115:502-517. Emmybc (talk) 12:47, 29 June 2014 (UTC)

Quality Scale upgrade from 'Start' to 'C'
I stumbled across this very good article to make sure I remembered some details about the overconfidence bias. I noticed the quality scale rating of Start-class, which this article is clearly beyond. In fact, I believe it merits a B-class rating, but I did not have time to read the article thoroughly, check some references, etc., so I erred on the side of being conservative. If someone, particularly someone conversant with the literature on cognitive biases, were to upgrade this article to B-class, I would support you. :o) -  Mark D Worthen PsyD  02:27, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Dr. Novarese's comment on this article
Dr. Novarese has reviewed this Wikipedia page, and provided us with the following comments to improve its quality:

"I’d add something more on these points:

- the critics by Gigerenzer and his group (he is quoted in the literature, but not mentioned in the text); - the eventual link between ability and overconfidence; for example the literature on students' overconfidence stress that better students are less confident because of metacognition (but see a possible different explanation here http://polis.unipmn.it/pubbl/RePEc/uca/ucapdv/polis0215.pdf); - in more general term also Daniel Kahneman (in a chapter on overconfidence in his “Thinking fast and slow”) connect overconfidence and experience/ability; experts can be overconfident when they have no clear feedback (a similar idea is expressed in the paper by Russo and Schoemaker, 1992, one of the most influential article, as for business applications). - among the positive effects of overconfidence there could be a link to Bandura on self efficacy; - business implications should probably include over investment and the decision to create a firm."

We hope Wikipedians on this talk page can take advantage of these comments and improve the quality of the article accordingly.

We believe Dr. Novarese has expertise on the topic of this article, since he has published relevant scholarly research:


 * Reference : Lotito, Gianna & Maffioletti, Anna & Novarese, Marco, 2014. "Are better students really less overconfident? A preliminary test of different measures," POLIS Working Papers 177, Institute of Public Policy and Public Choice - POLIS.

ExpertIdeasBot (talk) 18:55, 26 July 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just modified 1 one external link on Overconfidence effect. Please take a moment to review my edit. If you have any questions, or need the bot to ignore the links, or the page altogether, please visit this simple FaQ for additional information. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/web/20141107161146/https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/documents/ob_01_09_moore.pdf to https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/documents/ob_01_09_moore.pdf

When you have finished reviewing my changes, please set the checked parameter below to true or failed to let others know (documentation at ).

Cheers.— InternetArchiveBot  (Report bug) 04:42, 1 December 2016 (UTC)