Imagine you want access to a watering hole, but a nasty person arrives at this place at the same time as you & refuses to share. This person looks like he might be a bit stronger than you, but you can't be sure.
He might be bluffing.
If you are totally honest with yourself, you'll walk away, & thus possibly remove yourself from the gene pool. If, instead, you feel slightly overconfident given what you know about the other person, you might stand your ground, or go for some sort of bluff yourself.
When Johnson & Fowler plugged these strategies into a computer program & had simulated opponents face off in a struggle for limited resources, they found that, over several thousand generations, those who were slightly overconfident started to outperform those with other evaluations of themselves.
As long as the reward was worth fighting for, & both sides were naive about what they were up against, overconfidence won. Those who routinely overestimated their abilities never turned away from disputes in which it seemed like a toss-up as to who could win, & they sometimes won even when they were the underdog because the other party didn't call their unwitting bluff. The more uncertain the computer opponents were, the more advantageous it became to be overconfident.
You have the capacity to rationally judge the risks & benefits, the costs & rewards, of complex systems, but in a pinch you can fall back on a simple & reliable shortcut: just be slightly & blindly overconfident.
The best bluff, it turns out, is the one in which even the bluffer is unaware of the cards he is holding.
If you could accurately assess the odds against you -- whether those odds took the shape of a hunting expedition, a one-on-one fight, or the job market for philosophy majors -- you would probably turn away from the struggle more often than not. There is always plenty of evidence that the odds are not in your favor, enough to deter you from trying just about everything in life.
Luckily for you, most of the time you have no idea what you are getting into, & you greatly overestimate your chances for success.
It makes sense that primates like you would have evolved a fondness for delusions of grandeur. That's the sort of attitude that gets you out of caves & beds.
The relentless bombardment of challenges & tribulations makes it very difficult to be a person, whether you must fend off rabid beavers or ravenous bill collectors. Those who tried just a few percentage points harder, who persevered just a smidge longer, defeated nature more often than the realists. You've inherited a tendency to thrash against the odds, to be optimistic in the face of futility.
On average, positive illusions work, but left unchecked, they can lead to terrible decisions & policies. Overconfidence is a powerful tool to drive behaviors & encourage perseverance against strife & uncertainty in both your personal life & in the lives of nations & institutions. Occasionally, though, that same emotional state can mutate into hubris & blind ambition.
History is littered with the bodies, both real & metaphorical, of self-enhancement biases. The same irrational, unrealistic overconfidence swimming in your nervous system can be disastrous should you find yourself leading millions or tending to their investments.
Your evolved response is to allow your brain to trick you into doing what maximizes fitness in your species, even though that benefit shows up only over the course of millions of lifetimes. In an isolated instance, in a specific situation, overconfidence may not be the best state of mind, & the behaviors that spring from that sort of reality assessment may not be the best actions in the great multiple-choice exam of life.
When you dissolve that situation into the billions that humans faced over their journey into modernity, though, it averages out to be the preferred route to just about every destination.
Your brain fiddles with your emotions to get you to do what usually works by suggesting that you are more awesome than you actually are, even in scenarios in which that would be a terrible mistake.
Sometimes you pause, think, & reject the suggestion. Sometimes you don't. As some experts have pointed out, this general strategy matured among small societies without the ability to prevent or cause great harm. Modern society is large & complex, with institutions wielding great power over the lives of many. This is why Johnson & Fowler added a dire parting shot in their predictions.
Since you are programmed to become increasingly overconfident the less you understand about any given scenario, you can expect to find the most destructive overconfidence in places that are exceedingly complicated & unpredictable. Their examples include governments, wars, financial markets, & natural disasters.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment