Articles for ielts the dangers of being over-confident

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The dangers of being over-confident 
Imagine you are in a fight with a grizzly bear. And you’re not armed. It’s just 
you against the bear in a straight fight. Who do you think would win? How about in 
a fight with a crocodile or a king cobra or an eagle?
When over 1,700 people were asked these questions in a YouGov poll in the 
US in 2021, 6% of respondents reckoned they could beat the bear and a slighter 
larger number fancied their chances against the crocodile. And when it came to a 
fight with a king cobra, fully 23% of men said they would win. Meanwhile, 38% of 
men thought they could beat an eagle. Maybe, some of the respondents were Tarzan-
types with superb fighting skills. More likely they were showing off or were 
ridiculously overconfident. So, how about landing a plane in an emergency without 
crashing it and killing everybody on board? Could you do that? In a recent study, a 
researcher called Kayla Jordan at the University of Waikato in New Zealand asked 
this question.
Again, the levels of over-confidence were striking. Half of the people she 
asked thought they had a one-in-five-chance of landing the plane successfully. And 
when those questioned were shown a three-minute video of a trained pilot landing a 
plane, they became even more confident, rating their chances at 30%. A quarter of 
respondents went even further saying they put their chances at 60%. Yes, in a 
scenario in which they suddenly had to take the controls of plane without any help, 
and while acknowledging that landing a plane is a highly skilled task, requiring great 
expertise, an astounding number of people with no experience or skill thought they 
were more likely than not to bring the plane safely to ground. This was despite the 
fact that the video was shot from the back of the cockpit, there was no sound, viewers 
couldn’t see what the pilots’ hands were doing from that angle and a pilot who 
watched it declared it 100% useless. 
Of course, there are real-life examples of passengers who have taken the controls of 
a plane and landed it successfully after a pilot has fallen ill and collapsed in the 
cockpit. A recent example took place in Florida in May 2022. But the passenger in 
this instance, Darren Harrison, had the benefit of being talked through the landing 
by an air traffic controller who was also a flying instructor. An experienced pilot has 
estimated that the chance of someone landing a plane without help is 10-15%, much 
lower odds than many in the New Zealand study gave themselves. Over-confidence 
isn’t only on display in situations of life and death. Another YouGov poll asked 

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people if they could score a point against 23-time Grand Slam winner Serena 
Williams in a game of tennis if they were playing at their very best. Seven per cent 
of respondents felt they could, rising to 12% among men.
Driving is another area where we have an exaggerated sense of our abilities. 
In a much-cited study from the US in 1981, it was found that 93% of drivers believed 
they were above average drivers, which is of course statistically highly unlikely. 
This cognitive bias sometimes gets called the Lake Wobegon Effect after the author 
Garrison Keiller’s fictional town in which all the children are above average; a more 
technical term is illusory superiority or simply, the-above-average effect. For 
someone to be above average, some people do of course need to be average and 
others need to be below average, but we still don’t like placing ourselves in the latter 
category. Likewise, few of us care to admit we don’t know things and this can lead 
to overclaiming. Have you heard of cholarine? How about plates of parallax? Both 
are made-up scientific terms, but a neat study found many people said yes when they 
were asked if they had heard of them. Of course, a little over-confidence can be 
useful. We want children to believe in themselves and have a go at new things. 
Success often comes from taking risks and stretching ourselves to the limits of our 
abilities or beyond. If you display confidence in yourself, you inspire confidence in 
others. You are more likely to be believed, trusted and promoted if you express your 
views confidently. There is, though, a paradoxical element to all this boosterism 
which is known in psychology as the Dunning-Kruger effect after a study which 
showed that the people who overestimated their abilities the most were the worst 
when it came to actual attainment. 
So where does all this overconfidence come from? An obvious factor is 
personality type. In work on overclaiming, people who score high on narcissism are 
far more likely to be know-it-alls. And as we’ve seen already, gender also has an 
impact. Whether it’s fighting a bear or winning a point off Serena Williams, on 
average men are more likely to display overconfidence. Of course, men do tend to 
be physically stronger than women, so perhaps we’d expect to see this pattern with 
these types of question, but when it comes to landing a plane, men were also more 
confident than women. However, it’s not just about who we are, but what we do. If 
you think back to the study where people watched the video of the cockpit, it was 
that experience which increased their confidence. The authors believe the reason the 
video had such an impact was that it acted as a springboard to imagine themselves 
in that role. The obvious problem with misplaced confidence is that it can get us into 
trouble. Kayla Jordan, who carried out the plane-landing study, certainly believes 

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we should guard against it, as she told me in an interview on the BBC’s All in the 
Mind. We have established that watching just one really short video can boost 
confidence by nearly 28%. If you think you can land a plane when you can’t, then 
the rest of the passengers might be grateful if you allowed someone with more 
expertise to do the job." This is surely sound advice. We live in a culture that 
encourages us to think that we "can do anything" if only we "believe in ourselves". 
We don’t want to be hobbled by self-doubt or a fear of failure. But an honest 
assessment of our abilities is important too. So, if you find yourself facing a grizzly 
bear it is probably better to avoid getting into a fight. And if Serena Williams 
challenges you to a game of tennis, it might be best to offer a polite "no".