Experts are led astray not by what they believe, but by how they think.
I was recently heading up a cross-functional initiative and needed to work with a Principal Engineer from another team to accomplish it. Let’s call him Phony Baloney. There were a lot of technical details to work out, and as developers do, we split hairs over all of them. Phony Baloney was the loudest voice in the Zoom, insisting, time and time again, that his way was The Only Way. Sometimes he was right, but we all knew when he was wrong. When we presented evidence contrary to his positions, PB refused to acknowledge it, and instead turned the focus to some other bikeshed to paint or resorted to bullying tactics.
I couldn’t push things forward without his blessing and time was running out. Realizing we were never going to make progress, I abandoned the project and took a different tack with my team.
There are two points to pull out from this story:
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Mr. Baloney was being an a**hole
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Mr. Baloney was overconfident
I know I’ve been guilty of both!
In this article, we’ll look at how we can avoid the former while addressing the latter.
But first…
What is Overconfidence?
According to ye olde Wikipedia, the overconfidence effect is:
a well-established bias in which a person’s subjective confidence in his or her judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high.
Why Do We Become Overconfident?
Daniel Kahneman considers overconfidence to be “the most significant of the cognitive biases.” In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he outlines the following illusions that contribute to it:
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The Illusion of Understanding
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The Illusion of Validity
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The Illusion of Skill
Let’s take a look at each of these…
The Illusion of Understanding
In The Black Swan, Nassim Nicholas Taleb introduces the concept of the narrative fallacy, which “addresses our limited ability to look at a sequence of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them.” This failure in our reasoning causes us to look for cause and effect from disparate events and create stories to connect them, leading us to an illusory understanding of the world.
To illustrate this, Kahenman uses the example of Google. Most of us are familiar with the story: Larry Page and Sergey Brin cooked up a super-fast search engine at Stanford, started the company in a Silicon Valley garage, and ate the world. But this narrative leaves out one important thing:
luck
Yes, Page and Brin made a lot of sound decisions that led to their success, but they also made some bad decisions that, luckily for them, didn’t pan out. For example, a year in, they were ready to sell the company for less than a million, but the buyer thought they were asking too much! This sale that didn’t happen is a “nonevent” and, according to Kahnemen, “the human mind does not deal well with nonevents.” What we want are simple stories of triumph and failure, but “no story can include the myriad of events that would have caused a different outcome.” The Google narrative written above also does not take into account the bad luck that fell on the competition, allowing the company to dominate the market.
Kahneman provides us with a simple heuristic for assessing our understanding of a narrative:
The ultimate test of an explanation is whether it would have made the event predictable in advance.
If the success of Google was predictable in advance, why didn’t we all get in on their IPO?
🤔
Here’s Kahneman’s summary of the Illusion of Understanding:
You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.
Whether or not you subscribe to the Agile Manifesto, this explains why retrospectives and post-mortems are important: to periodically reflect and capture “the facts” before the stories are written.
The Illusion of Validity
Kahneman introduces the illusion of validity using a personal story. He and a group of colleagues were working for the Israeli army to identify new recruits that would likely excel in leadership roles. The new recruits were assembled in an artificial problem-solving scenario, not unlike an escape room, while Kahneman and crew observed and made their evaluations. Three months later, the evaluators would reconvene to see how the cadets were performing in the field. As Kahneman recounts, “Our forecasts were better than blind guesses, but not by much.” And yet, they repeated the process, confidently evaluating new recruits as though their assessments were valid predictors of success.
According to Kahneman:
Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.
This is, again, related to the narrative fallacy. Kahneman and his colleagues were working with the information available to them and, as he puts it, had “no good way to represent [their] ignorance”.
The Illusion of Skill
Kahneman uses investors to illustrate the illusion of skill. He first cites a study by Terry Odean, where, for the individual investors participating, the conclusion was that “taking a shower and doing nothing would have been a better policy” than buying or selling a given stock. Regarding mutual funds, Kahneman draws on evidence from 50 years of research which concludes that “the selection of stock is more like rolling of dice than playing poker.”
Why are investors so overconfident?
According to Kahneman, individuals who suffer from the illusion of skill are:
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Exercising high-level skills. Subject matter experts are performing “serious work that requires extensive training, and the people who do it have immediate (and valid) experience using these skills.” But following The Law of the Instrument, these skills can lead you to become a hammer and see everything as a nail, overconfident in your abilities and ignorant of your own ignorance.
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Sustained by a community of like-minded believers. Subject matter experts “believe themselves to be among the chosen few who can do what they believe others cannot.”
How Do We Overcome Overconfidence?
How can we be confident in our confidence? We’ll look at the following three strategies:
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Checklists
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Feedback and practice
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Metacognition
Checklists: Algorithms for Experts
According to Kahneman, “experts are inferior to algorithms” because:
…you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgment or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstances.
To counter this inconsistency, Kahneman recommends formulas, because:
Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer.
We can easily see how this applies to programming through automation. We write tests, we set up CI/CD, we sleep through the night.
How do we create formulas for our meatware?
Checklists.
In The Checklist Manifesto, Atul Gawande recounts events where the implementation of a checklist saved lives, from the airline industry to healthcare, stating that:
Good checklists …are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.
Human error can be mitigated with a checklist. More than that, a checklist helps humans know how to respond when things don’t go as planned. Unfortunately, we don’t like checklists. According to Gawande:
It somehow feels beneath us to use a checklist, an embarrassment. It runs counter to deeply held beliefs about how the truly great among us—those we aspire to be—handle situations of high stakes and complexity. The truly great are daring. They improvise. They do not have protocols and checklists. Maybe our idea of heroism needs updating.
Yes, and, our ideas of productivity need updating as well. The Productivity Guru, James Clear, recommends what he calls “habit stacking”,where “one of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top.”
✅ Confidence
Feedback and Practice: Not Just for Rock Bands Anymore
How can we trust expert intuition?
We can’t.
But we can trust pattern recognition.
According to political scientist Herbert Simon, “Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.”
We can confirm this through a study of firefighters by researcher Gary Klein. When battling a blaze, firefighters need to make split second life-and-death decisions, many claiming that they know what to do in the moment due to “intuition”. Klein discovered that they:
…draw on the repertoire of patterns that they had compiled during more than a decade of both real and virtual experience to identify a plausible option, which they considered first.
Where have we seen this or something like it before?
Chunking!
Chunks are separate bits of information united through meaning. With chunking, we learn a concept then combine that concept with other concepts to solve problems. If we encounter a concept that is too big to understand, we need to break it into smaller chunks, then recombine the chunks.
In the words of Kahneman, “…expertise in a domain is not a single skill but rather a large collection of miniskills.”
How do we acquire “intuition”?
It requires two basic conditions be met:
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an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable
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an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice
And, according to Kahneman, “When both these conditions are satisfied, intuitions are likely to be skilled.” Otherwise, “Claims for correct intuitions in an unpredictable situation are self-delusional at best, sometimes worse.” Furthermore, Kahneman advises us to remember this rule: “…intuitions cannot be trusted in the absence of stable regularities in the environment.”
How do we discover and apply regularities in your environment?
Feedback and practice.
Programming meets both conditions. Our development environments are predictable and we certainly get prolonged practice and feedback!
Let’s Get Metaconfident: Thinking About Thinking
In Learn Like a Pro, Barbara Oakley recommends metacognition to counter overconfidence. She describes metacognition as “an extra brain outside your main one” that “thinks about how you are thinking”.
According to Oakley, when learning a new skill or how to use a tool, “metacognition is what allows you to learn when to use the tools, and improves your ability to use those tools.” This also helps you avoid being surprised when you receive harsh feedback or your intuitions fail.
A study published in 2016, Neural correlates of metacognitive ability and of feeling confident: a large-scale fMRI study, revealed that “increased confidence was associated with lower metacognitive accuracy.” In the Abstract, the authors conclude that:
People vary widely in their metacognitive ability and in general are too confident when evaluating their performance. This often leads to poor decision making with potentially disastrous consequences.
How do we avoid making poor decisions?
According to Oakley, “the easiest way to become more metacognitive is simply to start asking yourself higher-level questions,” such as:
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What are the resources available to help me when I struggle?
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Do I focus on the right things at the right level? Should I prioritize differently?
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Can I be more effective? What can I improve?
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What do I find difficult and why?
How To Be Confident In Your Confidence
Overconfidence is a cognitive bias caused by the illusions of understanding, validity, and skill. We can be confident in our confidence by using checklists, feedback and practice, and metacognition.