Overconfidence Can Be Transmitted From Person To Person

In this study, participants were indirectly influenced by a fictitious former partner of their own partner in the weight-guessing task.) Further work revealed that these confidence effects can persist, still being evident several days later. Importantly, two of the studies produced evidence that the influence of overconfident peers on a participant’s own self-estimations happened largely outside their conscious awareness. As the team writes, if you’re unaware of such a “stealthy” transmission of bias, this could make it harder to resist. The work also reveals one important qualifier to all these effects: overconfidence transmission occurs only within in-groups. In this case, student participants were influenced by the responses of “partners” who were identified as attending the same university, but not by responses from people identified as coming from a rival university sports team, for example. “That is, individuals do not copy indiscriminately”, the team writes. “Instead they are sensitive to whose mental representations are on display and selectively acquire the over-placement of in-group but not out-group members.” This is consistent with theories about cultural learning. However, as the researchers themselves point out, these studies focused on over-placement as one form of overconfidence. More work will be needed to investigate whether this kind of social transmission occurs for other forms, such as over-estimation, which relates str...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Cognition Social Teams Source Type: blogs