ISLAMABAD, (APP): Being overconfident can often lead a person to
wrong decision making and miss out on opportunities to learn, finds a study.
Researchers have found that those who think intelligence is fixed and
unchangeable tend to be more overconfident, reported BBC health.
“Such people tend to maintain their overconfidence by concentrating on
the easy parts of tasks while spending as little time as possible on the hard parts of tasks,” said Joyce Ehrlinger from Washington State University in the US.
The researchers note that overconfidence is a documented problem for
drivers, motorcyclists, bungee jumpers, doctors and lawyers.
“A little bit of overconfidence can be helpful, but larger amounts of
overconfidence can lead people to make bad decisions and to miss out on
opportunities to learn,” Ehrlinger added.
But people who hold a growth mindset, meaning they think intelligence is a changeable quality – spend more time on the challenging parts of tasks,
Consequently, their levels of confidence are more in line with their
abilities.
The researchers note that overconfidence is a documented problem for
drivers, motorcyclists, bungee jumpers, doctors and lawyers. According to the first of three studies, the researchers found that students who hold a fixed mindset about intelligence were more overconfident about their performance on a multiple-choice test than those with a growth mindset.
The second study found that students with fixed mindsets devoted less
attention to difficult problems and, consequently, displayed more
overconfidence than those with growth mindsets.
Further evidence for this conclusion came from a third study, which
showed that forcing fixed theorists to really look at the difficult as well as the easy parts of an intellectual task shook their confidence, inspiring more accurate impressions of their performance.
“We know that students’ beliefs about intelligence are very
consequential in the classroom and that interventions teach students a growth mindset lead to improvements in their grades,” Ehrlinger said.
“We also know that being overconfident keeps people from learning. You
have to understand and acknowledge what you don’t yet know in order to truly
learn,” Ehrlinger explained.