Overconfidence bias

Overconfidence bias A tendency to overestimate the accuracy of your predictions, despite evidence to the contrary. Both the guides and their clients exhibited this bias they felt confident about their success even though the data on successful ascents of Mount Everest did not justify it. 

Commission bias is the tendency to act before we have a sufficient understanding of the situation. While we sometimes act precipitously because of the overconfidence bias (see below), we... 

Overconfidence bias (or epistemic arrogance) and optimism bias... 

Bias can help explain why capable leaders make and accept poor decisions—why a skilled clinician will filter out hazards (overconfidence bias), why a senior leader will not terminate a poor performer he has coached, despite the team member s consistently poor performance (sunk cost bias), and why the treatment team will live with a safety system that delivers weak safety performance (status quo bias). 

The mistakes can be cognitive errors ( 1 didn t know that ), or confirmation bias ( I misunderstood the situation ), which can lead to overconfidence. 

As discussed in Chapter 1, accidents happen when people under pressure make mistakes. The mistakes may have either immediate or delayed consequences. They may be mistakes of commission (doing something in error) or omission (not doing something they should have done). They may be cognitive errors ( I didn t know that ), or confirmation bias ( I misunderstood the situation ), which can lead to overconfidence. 

In addition to short-term misjudgement of risk, there may be long-term underestimation of risk due to what is called unrealistic optimism bias . If a sample of drivers is asked how they rate their own quality as a driver as compared to others, it is typically found that more than half of them say that they are better than the average driver (Svenson, 1981 DeJoy, 1989). This arithmetical absurdity has also been observed in numerous fields other than driving and is due to the fact that overconfidence is more frequent than under-confidence. People are more likely to have expectations that are unrealistically optimistic than unrealistically pessimistic (Weinstein, 1980 Wright, 1984 Horvath and Zuckerman, 1993). It is thus possible that people more often do not underestimate the traffic accident risk they expose themselves to. 

Why did the clinical staff decide to take action, after being explicitly told by a mentally competent patient that she declined certain kinds of care Although we have no inside information on this case, we suspect that certain biases were involved. When the patient lapsed into unconsciousness, the overconfidence and confirmation biases may have caused the staff to judge that they were correct about the life-saving necessity of a blood transfusion. The deformation professionnelle bias may have limited the treatment team s frame of reference to that of healer and left them unable... 

---