What do you think?
Rate this book
Beyond Doubt: Overconfidence and What It Means for Modern Society
About the Book
AN URGENT LOOK AT THE IMPACT OF OVERCONFIDENCE ON MODERN SOCIETY AND WHAT WE CAN DO TO COMBAT IT.
Every one of us knows overconfidence intimately, although it is perhaps easiest to spot in others. The uncle who knows everything. The city planners who consistently underestimate timelines and costs. The stranger who lectures you on your subject. In fact, the less we know, the more confident we are.
But what if this foolhardy overconfidence has a reason to persist? What if it is a superpower that gives us longer lives, more motivation and, above all, the ability to influence others? From businesspersons to politicians, leaders to newsmakers, we place our trust in people who appear to know what they are doing. What if overconfidence is the secret to their success? Can it lead to disaster? Are we capable of seeing through false confidence in time?
Drawing on research in psychology, political science and evolutionary biology—weighing up the evidence and the counterevidence—behavioural biologist Vivek Nityananda explores the many dimensions of overconfidence, what it means for modern society and how we can combat it in our everyday lives. An urgent, compelling—and entertaining—read.
About the Author
Vivek Nityananda grew up in Bangalore, India, where he trained as a biologist. A scientist and a science communicator, Nityananda is currently a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution and the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University, UK. He has several publications in the fields of evolutionary biology, animal behaviour and psychology. Nityananda is also an illustrator and has published short stories, including in Penguin India’s new writing anthology, First Proof 7.
Find him at viveknityananda.com.
AN URGENT LOOK AT THE IMPACT OF OVERCONFIDENCE ON MODERN SOCIETY AND WHAT WE CAN DO TO COMBAT IT.
Every one of us knows overconfidence intimately, although it is perhaps easiest to spot in others. The uncle who knows everything. The city planners who consistently underestimate timelines and costs. The stranger who lectures you on your subject. In fact, the less we know, the more confident we are.
But what if this foolhardy overconfidence has a reason to persist? What if it is a superpower that gives us longer lives, more motivation and, above all, the ability to influence others? From businesspersons to politicians, leaders to newsmakers, we place our trust in people who appear to know what they are doing. What if overconfidence is the secret to their success? Can it lead to disaster? Are we capable of seeing through false confidence in time?
Drawing on research in psychology, political science and evolutionary biology—weighing up the evidence and the counterevidence—behavioural biologist Vivek Nityananda explores the many dimensions of overconfidence, what it means for modern society and how we can combat it in our everyday lives. An urgent, compelling—and entertaining—read.
About the Author
Vivek Nityananda grew up in Bangalore, India, where he trained as a biologist. A scientist and a science communicator, Nityananda is currently a BBSRC David Phillips Fellow at the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution and the Biosciences Institute at Newcastle University, UK. He has several publications in the fields of evolutionary biology, animal behaviour and psychology. Nityananda is also an illustrator and has published short stories, including in Penguin India’s new writing anthology, First Proof 7.
Find him at viveknityananda.com.
363 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 7, 2024
3 people are currently reading
12 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 12, 2025
The subject of this book interested me enough to read it twice. During the first pass, I could not grasp the implications of all the author’s arguments. As the subtitle says, author Nityananda investigates the trait of overconfidence and what it means to modern society. He brings his research into human psychology and animal behavior to analyze overconfidence and whether it is all-pervasive and hence dangerous. The work of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, among many others, inspires him to wonder whether overconfidence helps us to get through our lives. Hence, it may have an evolutionary advantage in persisting in our cultures. Does it help us deceive others and hence influence them? Is this what businesspeople, political leaders, journalists and even researchers do? Are we doomed to stay overconfident in our own biased bubbles?
According to the book, overconfidence plays a crucial role in triggering or worsening a range of calamities, such as economic crises, wars, pandemics, and electing unqualified leaders. Despite these harmful consequences causing damage to societies, overconfidence persists because the people who cause them prosper because of it. The overconfident politician who over-promises becomes popular though he might under-deliver. An investor who risks other people’s money in high-risk investments gets richer through fat commissions despite causing financial mayhem. The authoritarian leader who makes risky military decisions ending up in immense loss of lives, continues to rule by passing the blame on to his minions. Individual gain versus societal harm presents a problem demanding resolution. The book quotes a voluminous number of studies of other researchers to support its thesis. It suggests that overconfidence led to the chaos during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author believes overconfidence of political and military leaders played a crucial role in the current Ukraine war, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the 2003 Iraq War. The overconfidence of CEOs of the various investment banks caused the 2008 financial crisis. At the close, the book offers strategies to mitigate overconfidence at both the individual and institutional level. We can cultivate humility, encourage critical thinking, and create environments that value questioning to ease this problem.
My feelings were mixed as I reached the end of the book on my second pass. I agreed with the author’s principal argument that overconfidence leads people and leaders to overestimate their abilities, causing harm. I could also agree that overconfidence plays a role, albeit a supplementary one, in the other calamities the author talks about. Most of the examples which suggest that it catalyses wars, pandemics, financial and other crises did not convince me enough to attribute them to overconfidence. There are multiple reasons for this.
First, the book does not define overconfidence with precision. Often, I wondered if I have the same understanding of overconfidence as the author. On page 2, the author says overconfidence is a specific form of self-deception, without elaborating what this specific form is. Later, on page 105, he says it is a cognitive bias or a product of other cognitive biases that may not lead to negative life outcomes. He follows it up, saying overconfidence is a consistent bias in one’s actions or self-perceptions, and rational in terms of selfish gains. However, on page 143, he calls overconfidence a specific form of irrationality, with overestimation and overprecision being forms of overconfidence. Elsewhere in the chapter on ‘Wars’, we see ‘positive illusions’ as a characteristic of overconfidence. It occurred to me that other traits like healthy self-regard, pride, self-assurance, arrogance, narcissism or boastfulness also exhibit similar signs of self-deception, cognitive bias, positive illusion and irrational behavior. How do we tell overconfidence apart from them? This makes the reader wonder if it is just our cognitive biases that harm society in wars, pandemics, etc, rather than one predominant bias called overconfidence.
Second, the book’s analysis oversimplifies complex issues like the Vietnam war, the Pearl Harbor attack, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 2008 financial crisis to fit in overconfidence as a catalyst. Historical grievances over decades and geo-political ambitions cause wars. Global economic imbalances and the complexity of financial instruments lead to financial crisis. To explain them through a single cognitive bias, like overconfidence, forces the author to generalize and make sweeping statements on these issues. Third, on issues like the Ukraine or the Vietnam war, the book shows confirmation bias and ignores contradictory evidence or analysis. Fourth, the book displays an excessive appeal to authority, quoting conclusions from other researchers without critical evaluation. The book itself is about the widespread prevalence of bias and so, we have to assume these researchers also have their bias. A casual look at the reference section shows over 700 works of other researchers cited in the book. The author seldom quotes the results from these works with resounding agreement. The most frequent expressions he uses about those studies are neutral. For example, while speculating whether people from East Asia are less overconfident, at least in specific skill-related areas, the book says: “It is tempting to see the successful response to the pandemic in Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea as vindication of the idea that cultures in these countries reflect a better, less overconfident attitude to governance. We don’t know this for certain, of course. What we need is a more detailed study building on a variety of factors to confirm this hypothesis”. The author realizes we cannot generalize about governance overall in East Asia from a response to the pandemic in just four countries. Similar doubts appear across many studies, including one speculating whether women are less overconfident than men or female leadership is wiser than male leadership. All these studies are hypothesis at best and do not help the author’s primary postulate. In the following paragraphs, I shall counter some arguments of the author in the chapters on wars, pandemic, politicians, etc.
The book blames overconfidence for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It says information avoidance, denial and self-deception in the USSR led to overconfidence, which allowed the accident to occur in the plant. But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) produced two reports on the causes of the Chernobyl disaster, called INSAG-1 and INSAG-7 (International Safety Advisory Group). INSAG-1, in 1986, concluded that the principal cause of the accident was the actions of the operators. It also identified a lack of safety culture at all levels of the organization as a major factor. INSAG-7, in 1992, concluded that the primary cause of the accident was the design of the reactor. Neither of them cited overconfidence as the reason for the accident.
The book also argues that a nation’s pandemic preparedness inversely reflects its overconfidence. The author uses it to criticize the US and the UK on Covid-19. This is a criticism based on hindsight. In the wealthy West, prevalent health issues include cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. Other common problems are certain cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and problems stemming from poor diet, lack of exercise, and excessive alcohol use. Western nations have not seen a pandemic in a century, i.e., over five generations. Their unpreparedness for Covid-19 was the rational state of nations to an event (pandemic) that had not occurred for a century. If East Asia was better prepared, it was because they had encountered respiratory diseases for two decades before 2019.
Further, the book calls under-funded and poorly structured healthcare systems as representing overconfidence. Healthcare systems in most developing nations are under-funded and not well-structured. Poverty causes a lack of funds and a paucity of technical / scientific expertise, resulting in poor structure. I don’t see how it can imply overconfidence in their healthcare systems. It only shows their priority lies elsewhere. A country like India would prioritize its scarce resources on job creation, education, poverty eradication, etc. more than its health problems like malaria, tuberculosis, and malnutrition.
The book sees overconfidence in handling Covid-19 in the conduct of leaders like Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. These leaders derided the ban on shaking hands, wearing masks, avoiding crowds, etc during Covid-19. It may be evidence of arrogance, denial or overconfidence. We could also see it as the right-wing asserting its politics, challenging the dominant role of science in decision-making. It could be the less-educated population in society defying science and taking an unusual response on Covid, however disastrous. One might call it irrational and suicidal, and it may not stem from overconfidence.
The chapter, “Very smart people with a lot of money,” attributes the 2008 financial crisis to overconfident investment bank CEOs. One can agree that overconfidence of the fund managers, regulatory authorities, and the government played a significant role in the exacerbation of the 2008 crisis. However, it is simplistic to blame the big banks alone for the crisis. The causes were systemic. Experts who investigated the crisis have elaborated on the 2008 crisis: “The whole financial chain of investment banks, regulatory authorities, rating agencies and the mortgage industry had created a set of misaligned incentives that made the 2008 crisis inevitable. Everyone in the financial chain profited from creating and selling risky products. They passed the eventual risks on to investors, homeowners, and taxpayers. Bankers and traders received large bonuses based on short-term profits. Since mortgage originators sold off their loans, there was no incentive for them to verify borrower credibility. The very institutions whose securities they were rating paid the rating agencies. Investment banks made money from creating and selling risky and complex securities which were ill-understood. Profit-seeking traders often overruled internal risk managers in banks. Pressure to maintain market share led to lowered lending standards.” However, overconfidence is not a cause that figures in these reports.
On wars, the author quotes Lawrence Freedman, strategic studies expert, to say that Putin was overconfident, consulting only those who shared his prejudices of Ukrainian military weakness. It made him invade Ukraine, expecting an easy victory after Feb 24, 2022. Now, we know it was not only Putin who expected an easy victory. One day after the invasion, Newsweek, Washington Post and CNN concurred Kyiv could fall in ‘days’. US administration officials and intelligence told Newsweek that Kyiv could fall in 96 hours. Hence, Putin might have felt self-assured and justified in his assumptions without being overconfident.
The author cites historian Barbara Tuchman to claim that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was an instance of overconfidence working against Japan’s own interests. Tuchman calls it only a ‘folly’, but the author believes overconfidence works well in this case. However, the UK’s Imperial War Museum gives altogether different reasons for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. When Japan occupied French Indochina in 1941, the US retaliated by freezing all Japanese assets in the US, preventing Japan from purchasing oil. Having lost 94% of its oil supply and unwilling to submit to U. S demands, Japan planned to take the oil needed by force. However, striking south into British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies would be a certain provocation for an armed US response. To blunt that response, Japan attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, hoping that the US would negotiate for peace. The gamble failed, but it was a rational gamble and not overconfidence of its leadership. This is one example of complex issues being simplified to fit the book’s thesis.
Most readers would agree with the book’s argument that overconfidence is harmful to the individual, the corporation, society, and the nation. But it may play only an auxiliary role in wars, pandemics, financial crashes, etc. It may speed up a crisis sometimes, but is unlikely to be the primary cause of major catastrophes.
According to the book, overconfidence plays a crucial role in triggering or worsening a range of calamities, such as economic crises, wars, pandemics, and electing unqualified leaders. Despite these harmful consequences causing damage to societies, overconfidence persists because the people who cause them prosper because of it. The overconfident politician who over-promises becomes popular though he might under-deliver. An investor who risks other people’s money in high-risk investments gets richer through fat commissions despite causing financial mayhem. The authoritarian leader who makes risky military decisions ending up in immense loss of lives, continues to rule by passing the blame on to his minions. Individual gain versus societal harm presents a problem demanding resolution. The book quotes a voluminous number of studies of other researchers to support its thesis. It suggests that overconfidence led to the chaos during the Covid-19 pandemic. The author believes overconfidence of political and military leaders played a crucial role in the current Ukraine war, the Pearl Harbor attack, and the 2003 Iraq War. The overconfidence of CEOs of the various investment banks caused the 2008 financial crisis. At the close, the book offers strategies to mitigate overconfidence at both the individual and institutional level. We can cultivate humility, encourage critical thinking, and create environments that value questioning to ease this problem.
My feelings were mixed as I reached the end of the book on my second pass. I agreed with the author’s principal argument that overconfidence leads people and leaders to overestimate their abilities, causing harm. I could also agree that overconfidence plays a role, albeit a supplementary one, in the other calamities the author talks about. Most of the examples which suggest that it catalyses wars, pandemics, financial and other crises did not convince me enough to attribute them to overconfidence. There are multiple reasons for this.
First, the book does not define overconfidence with precision. Often, I wondered if I have the same understanding of overconfidence as the author. On page 2, the author says overconfidence is a specific form of self-deception, without elaborating what this specific form is. Later, on page 105, he says it is a cognitive bias or a product of other cognitive biases that may not lead to negative life outcomes. He follows it up, saying overconfidence is a consistent bias in one’s actions or self-perceptions, and rational in terms of selfish gains. However, on page 143, he calls overconfidence a specific form of irrationality, with overestimation and overprecision being forms of overconfidence. Elsewhere in the chapter on ‘Wars’, we see ‘positive illusions’ as a characteristic of overconfidence. It occurred to me that other traits like healthy self-regard, pride, self-assurance, arrogance, narcissism or boastfulness also exhibit similar signs of self-deception, cognitive bias, positive illusion and irrational behavior. How do we tell overconfidence apart from them? This makes the reader wonder if it is just our cognitive biases that harm society in wars, pandemics, etc, rather than one predominant bias called overconfidence.
Second, the book’s analysis oversimplifies complex issues like the Vietnam war, the Pearl Harbor attack, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 2008 financial crisis to fit in overconfidence as a catalyst. Historical grievances over decades and geo-political ambitions cause wars. Global economic imbalances and the complexity of financial instruments lead to financial crisis. To explain them through a single cognitive bias, like overconfidence, forces the author to generalize and make sweeping statements on these issues. Third, on issues like the Ukraine or the Vietnam war, the book shows confirmation bias and ignores contradictory evidence or analysis. Fourth, the book displays an excessive appeal to authority, quoting conclusions from other researchers without critical evaluation. The book itself is about the widespread prevalence of bias and so, we have to assume these researchers also have their bias. A casual look at the reference section shows over 700 works of other researchers cited in the book. The author seldom quotes the results from these works with resounding agreement. The most frequent expressions he uses about those studies are neutral. For example, while speculating whether people from East Asia are less overconfident, at least in specific skill-related areas, the book says: “It is tempting to see the successful response to the pandemic in Vietnam, Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea as vindication of the idea that cultures in these countries reflect a better, less overconfident attitude to governance. We don’t know this for certain, of course. What we need is a more detailed study building on a variety of factors to confirm this hypothesis”. The author realizes we cannot generalize about governance overall in East Asia from a response to the pandemic in just four countries. Similar doubts appear across many studies, including one speculating whether women are less overconfident than men or female leadership is wiser than male leadership. All these studies are hypothesis at best and do not help the author’s primary postulate. In the following paragraphs, I shall counter some arguments of the author in the chapters on wars, pandemic, politicians, etc.
The book blames overconfidence for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. It says information avoidance, denial and self-deception in the USSR led to overconfidence, which allowed the accident to occur in the plant. But the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) produced two reports on the causes of the Chernobyl disaster, called INSAG-1 and INSAG-7 (International Safety Advisory Group). INSAG-1, in 1986, concluded that the principal cause of the accident was the actions of the operators. It also identified a lack of safety culture at all levels of the organization as a major factor. INSAG-7, in 1992, concluded that the primary cause of the accident was the design of the reactor. Neither of them cited overconfidence as the reason for the accident.
The book also argues that a nation’s pandemic preparedness inversely reflects its overconfidence. The author uses it to criticize the US and the UK on Covid-19. This is a criticism based on hindsight. In the wealthy West, prevalent health issues include cardiovascular disease, obesity, and type 2 diabetes. Other common problems are certain cancers, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, and problems stemming from poor diet, lack of exercise, and excessive alcohol use. Western nations have not seen a pandemic in a century, i.e., over five generations. Their unpreparedness for Covid-19 was the rational state of nations to an event (pandemic) that had not occurred for a century. If East Asia was better prepared, it was because they had encountered respiratory diseases for two decades before 2019.
Further, the book calls under-funded and poorly structured healthcare systems as representing overconfidence. Healthcare systems in most developing nations are under-funded and not well-structured. Poverty causes a lack of funds and a paucity of technical / scientific expertise, resulting in poor structure. I don’t see how it can imply overconfidence in their healthcare systems. It only shows their priority lies elsewhere. A country like India would prioritize its scarce resources on job creation, education, poverty eradication, etc. more than its health problems like malaria, tuberculosis, and malnutrition.
The book sees overconfidence in handling Covid-19 in the conduct of leaders like Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. These leaders derided the ban on shaking hands, wearing masks, avoiding crowds, etc during Covid-19. It may be evidence of arrogance, denial or overconfidence. We could also see it as the right-wing asserting its politics, challenging the dominant role of science in decision-making. It could be the less-educated population in society defying science and taking an unusual response on Covid, however disastrous. One might call it irrational and suicidal, and it may not stem from overconfidence.
The chapter, “Very smart people with a lot of money,” attributes the 2008 financial crisis to overconfident investment bank CEOs. One can agree that overconfidence of the fund managers, regulatory authorities, and the government played a significant role in the exacerbation of the 2008 crisis. However, it is simplistic to blame the big banks alone for the crisis. The causes were systemic. Experts who investigated the crisis have elaborated on the 2008 crisis: “The whole financial chain of investment banks, regulatory authorities, rating agencies and the mortgage industry had created a set of misaligned incentives that made the 2008 crisis inevitable. Everyone in the financial chain profited from creating and selling risky products. They passed the eventual risks on to investors, homeowners, and taxpayers. Bankers and traders received large bonuses based on short-term profits. Since mortgage originators sold off their loans, there was no incentive for them to verify borrower credibility. The very institutions whose securities they were rating paid the rating agencies. Investment banks made money from creating and selling risky and complex securities which were ill-understood. Profit-seeking traders often overruled internal risk managers in banks. Pressure to maintain market share led to lowered lending standards.” However, overconfidence is not a cause that figures in these reports.
On wars, the author quotes Lawrence Freedman, strategic studies expert, to say that Putin was overconfident, consulting only those who shared his prejudices of Ukrainian military weakness. It made him invade Ukraine, expecting an easy victory after Feb 24, 2022. Now, we know it was not only Putin who expected an easy victory. One day after the invasion, Newsweek, Washington Post and CNN concurred Kyiv could fall in ‘days’. US administration officials and intelligence told Newsweek that Kyiv could fall in 96 hours. Hence, Putin might have felt self-assured and justified in his assumptions without being overconfident.
The author cites historian Barbara Tuchman to claim that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 was an instance of overconfidence working against Japan’s own interests. Tuchman calls it only a ‘folly’, but the author believes overconfidence works well in this case. However, the UK’s Imperial War Museum gives altogether different reasons for Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. When Japan occupied French Indochina in 1941, the US retaliated by freezing all Japanese assets in the US, preventing Japan from purchasing oil. Having lost 94% of its oil supply and unwilling to submit to U. S demands, Japan planned to take the oil needed by force. However, striking south into British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies would be a certain provocation for an armed US response. To blunt that response, Japan attacked the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, hoping that the US would negotiate for peace. The gamble failed, but it was a rational gamble and not overconfidence of its leadership. This is one example of complex issues being simplified to fit the book’s thesis.
Most readers would agree with the book’s argument that overconfidence is harmful to the individual, the corporation, society, and the nation. But it may play only an auxiliary role in wars, pandemics, financial crashes, etc. It may speed up a crisis sometimes, but is unlikely to be the primary cause of major catastrophes.
Displaying 1 of 1 review