Do our "everyday illusions" obscure our perceptions and cause us to place undeserved trust in our instincts and intuition?
The illusion of memory shows itself in vivid but embellished recollections of events, based only loosely on reality. This illusion turns out to be especially common in the case of emotionally charged events, such as 9/11 or the Challenger explosion. While we clearly remember more about such terrible days than the days that preceded them, the memories are much less accurate than we suppose—our recollection just isn't that good and often includes details that are plausible but inaccurate.
There's illusion of knowledge—we know less than we think—and the illusion of cause, where we mistake correlation for causation. For example, the appearance of autism symptoms soon after childhood vaccinations has widely—and mistakenly—been interpreted to suggest that vaccines are responsible for autism. Although scientifically discredited, this firmly held belief has led to many skipped vaccinations—and has left many children vulnerable to preventable disease.
While these illusions would presumably be damaging enough, what really does us in is the illusion of confidence: We profoundly underestimate our capacity to be fooled. This susceptibility seems both pernicious and pervasive, exacerbating our other failings while remaining a criterion for professional success.
Most of us tend to overestimate our intelligence, attractiveness, sense of humor and even our driving skills. In all these areas, data suggest, most of us believe that we are above average. Our overestimation of our abilities has especially profound consequences, when it causes us to lose sight of our limitations and forget how fragile our perceptions may be. Our knowledge of financial systems might be less robust than we recognize, but it is overconfidence in our spreadsheet models that can lead us to ruin.
Equally troubling is our tendency to overvalue self-assurance and confuse confidence with competence. Not only do we seek confident leaders, doctors, executives, advisers and workers but we believe their confidence reflects their ability and knowledge. On the one hand, this makes sense: We tend to speak more confidently about things we know best, so when people speak with confidence we assume that outward self-assurance is evidence of an underlying capability.
The trouble is that confidence is a trait, a "consistent quality that varies from one person to the next, but has relatively little to do with one's underlying knowledge or mental ability." An intrinsically confident person might exude confidence even when he knows very little, while someone less confident might appear hesitant even when he knows a lot. Our trouble recognizing this distinction can lead us to trust the wrong people and to underestimate the aptitude of those who are most self-aware.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, June 11, 2010
Christopher Chabris: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us