Are you dangerously overconfident?

We all are. David Brooks explains just how extreme our overconfidence can be:

Via The New Yorker:

Human beings are overconfidence machines. Paul J. H. Schoemaker and J. Edward Russo gave questionnaires to more than two thousand executives in order to measure how much they knew about their industries. Managers in the advertising industry gave answers that they were ninety-per-cent confident were correct. In fact, their answers were wrong sixty-one per cent of the time. People in the computer industry gave answers they thought had a ninety-five per cent chance of being right; in fact, eighty per cent of them were wrong. Ninety-nine per cent of the respondents overestimated their success.

David Brooks is the author of The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement.