Intellectual Hubris: Despite Errors, People Remain Overly Confident In Their Knowledge

Overprecision, excessive confidence in the accuracy of our knowledge, can have profound consequences in various ways, making people intolerant of dissenting views,  leading physicians to gravitate too quickly to a diagnosis or inflating investors' valuation of their investments. Overprecision is a common form of overconfidence driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments, say business scholars. A new paper in Psychological Science says that the more confident participants were about their estimates of an uncertain quantity, the less they adjusted their estimates in response to feedback about their accuracy and to the costs of being wrong. read more

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