#42: The Too-Sure Thing

Overconfidence can help explain wars, financial disasters, and collapsed 
civilizations. Social scientist James Fowler explores how such a destructive social 
trait manages to thrive.

By Veronique Greenwood
Dec 29, 2011 6:00 AMNov 12, 2019 5:28 AM
fowler.jpg
Photograph by Spencer Lowell

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The dot-com bust. The housing bubble. Bernie Madoff. The past decade has pounded us with examples of the dangers of overconfidence. One can imagine it would have been a dangerous quality among our ancestors as well. An early hominid who judged himself equal to a herd of mammoths most likely paid the ultimate price. So why, then, is overconfidence such a persistent evolutionary trait? Last year, in a mathematical model of evolution published in Nature, social scientists James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, and Dominic Johnson of the University of Edinburgh offered an explanation. They created a theoretical population and showed that, like it or not, overconfident individuals outcompete realists in many situations. The work is just the latest twist in Fowler’s broader investigation of one of the great conflicts in human nature: the battle between self-interest and group success.

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