• People act as if they are sure they know the truth

• They draw their bull’s eye too small

• Examples and consequences
• August 6th 1997 - Korean Air flight 801 – Seoul to Guam
• Jan 13th 2012 – Costa Concordia
• Organizational forecasts
• Why don’t we leave a margin of error
• Does this have to do with our outward show of confidence
• Why do we want to behave that way
• The US presidential debates/and not to forget our ‘jalsaas’
• Implications
• We all remember WMDs of Iraq
• It is one thing to be certain, but you can be certain and be wrong
• Why aren’t people afraid about their overconfidence being exposed?
• Over precision may be a by product of other cognitive processes such as
searching for evidences that confirms our believes
• As a result we over estimate the accuracy of our knowledge
• Even when we find that we were mistaken, we move in that instant from the
old belief to a new belief and as a consequence, we almost never have the
experience of believing something we know to be false
• Interventions
• Asking people the likelihood of alternative outcomes increases the accuracy of
judgement
• Taking others’ views
• Delphi method
• Naïve realism (Ross and Ward 1996)
• (the way we see the world is the only sensible view)
• Considering other perspectives takes energy because it requires us to
move from comfortable familiarity of how we are used to seeing
things
• If we could only accept our personal vulnerability to bias, we could
better anticipate our biases, correct them and avoid the errors they
cause.
(Hall should have announced the cut off time or …….)
Overestimation
• The tendency to think we are better across a number of domains than we
actually are
• The illusion of control – we have more control over circumstances than
we actually do…… (Thompson 1999)
• Superficial signs of control are enough to lead us to believe that we can
exert control over uncontrollable events (Langer 1975).
• The superstitious beliefs
• The planning fallacy – tendency to overestimate the speed at which we
complete projects and tasks (Buehler, Griffin and Ross 1994)
• It just feels good to believe in ourselves
• What about defensive pessimism
• Managing our expectations
• The moment of truth effect
Over placement
• The tendency to believe we are better than others in specific ways when we’re
actually not.
• Court battles vs. out of court settlements
• The “better-than-average” effect
• Consequences
• Inflated expectations; how do we choose a career?
• We usually go into ‘Underplacement’ mode in tasks which appear difficult
• We overplace out selves in more likely events and underplace in less likely events
• On average, doesn’t that cancel out?
• Consequences