Humans prefer cockiness to expertise | Hacker News Reader

Humans prefer cockiness to expertise

newscientist.com

125 pointskungfooey72 comments

It sounds crazy but I've seen this in action. At my last job they brought in a guy who was unmitigated disaster for a technical leadership position.

In short, he was the most arrogant, buzz-word filled SOB I ever had the displeasure of meeting,

After he finally got booted when people realized he didn't know a damn thing about technology I flat out asked the VP of engineering: "What did you ever see in him?".

He said: "You know, you're going to think I'm crazy, but he was exactly the same in the interview as he was around here daily, and I really thought that cockiness would mean he would take the lead on issues and be able to guide the younger guys".

So remember that kids, if you want to be seen as leadership material, thoughtfulness and pensiveness are not the way to go about it.

Just look at CTOs at companies you respect for further proof and see how many timid figures you find.

It doesn't sound crazy at all. This (particularly in the software development world) is exactly the sort of situation I had in mind when I read and posted the article. It seems to be a particularly acute problem in an industry where those responsible for who gets promoted know little about the technology involved.

Some guys who are cocky like that are insanely driven to justify their cockiness. I'm sure that's exactly what your VP was looking for: a classic driven, workaholic, alpha male executive.

This is an interesting topic from a geeky point of view, since geeks tend to be the opposite of cocky guys like this. Geeks tend to be meek and have bad posture and avoid boasting. The downside of this is that some geeks manage to avoid ever being in a position where they have to stretch themselves to live up to their boasting. Competition and arrogance drive a lot of achievement.

this is an excellent point.

At least if someone is confident and then wrong you can learn not to trust them. Someone who always hedges may never be quite as wrong, but is far less useful to a manager.

In an organizational structure it's not about one person being right, it's about the organization making a decision.

Exactly right, and a self-deprecating meek geek with bad posture who comes to realize that the world works this way can use this information to his advantage. First, observe that social skills can be learned the same way as anything else: by making empirical observations and performing experiments, and combining this with analysis and theory. More specifically: Actively seek out friends and opportunities for socialization and force a constant minimum level of social activity [empirical observations]. Push your boundaries and don't fear unfamiliar social situations [experiments]. Observe yourself in social situations and (dispassionately) note what you could have done better [analysis]. Read everything from pop psych self-help stuff (e.g. succeedsocially.com) to social psychology and evolutionary psychology (e.g. books and papers describing nonverbal communication and social signaling) [theory]. Learn to project confidence yet be your own worst critic. Be extremely aware of the breadth of your ignorance but don't be sheepish about what you have learned and done. Understand when to be a little hubristic and when to be a little deferential. These are things that we all do automatically to one degree or another, but we can all be more effective by actively observing ourselves and deliberately making adjustments. The downside is that getting better at these skills will necessarily involve a lot of fucking up, but the alternative is to just stay where you are without improving things.

I've recognized that what holds me back is what I fear and in some cases I feel default non-optimal social habits are my default because I am addicted to the feeling of being a lone wolf, the wallflower in a social situation.

As you point out, hacks only work if you iterate on them. You can't unit test social graces you can only have good exception handling. And good exception handling may come down to experience handling situations earned by actual trial-and-error and as this article says - a certain amount of cockiness.

Sounds crazy but I've used this in action. How do you think I got such high karma here? ;-)

Thing is - it works. Both online and in-person. I'd much rather be honest about how little I know (and often am when I'm working long-term with someone), but I've found it's a losing strategy in most situations. If you do know your stuff, you'll just get shouted down by idiots. Better to shout the idiots down first and then do the research to make sure you're not wrong. If you screw up everything, you'll probably get another chance simply by virtue of confidence (look at John Meriweather, who nearly brought down the global financial system three times and is still managing money), but if you appear timid and then screw up, people are all like "I knew he didn't really know what he was talking about..."

+1 for ballsiness

(look at John Meriweather, who nearly brought down the global financial system three times and is still managing money)

An important example. Chutzpah beats expertise in that domain.

Yes, it's much better to light a candle than curse the darkness.

I mean, become a cocky bastard who also knows his/her stuff, and have all the fun, rather than whining about how the cocky bastards have all the fun.

If everyone actually knew how little they know, they wouldn't be cocky.

There's nothing wrong with being self-assured in what you do know, and honest about what you don't, but cockiness does seems to be a good indicator of an individual's ignorance of his (or her) own ignorance.

I've found it's a losing strategy in most situations.

Prisoner's-dilemma problem: being honest about your level of confidence is better for everybody, but if other people aren't doing the same, it's worse for you.

The confidence thing is probably another leftover from the Stone Age. It probably works better for combat and mammoth hunting.

Actually, I find confident people much easier to evaluate - over time it's pretty easy to tell a bullshitter from someone who knows their stuff. When talking to people who hedge their bets too much (or worse still, don't speak up at all unless I have the time to prompt an answer out of them), I'm left with an unclear idea of their original position, so it's much harder to decide whether to trust them.

My favourite people are still those who state their conclusion, but will happily rattle off the list of assumptions they used to get there as well as how confident they are in that conclusion. But those people are pretty rare.

> Actually, I find confident people much easier to evaluate.

The same goes for why we may like extroverted people more than introverted types. Because with most extroverts, you're getting a relatively good impression of what they're about...because they're putting themselves out there (expressing their opinions); whereas with introverted types, you're using mental cycles trying to figure out what's their view/what do they want

May well be true, although there's a difference between being introverted and not having an opinion.

There are no shortage of extroverts who aren't going to let not having anything to say stop them from saying it. On the other side of the equation, if you manage to persuade your introverts to share their conclusions, you can get a beautiful signal-to-noise ratio.

"A bias for action" - if you try something, you can learn. But if you are (rightly and accurately) timid, you're less likely to.

One might think that bullshitting only works with people, and that if you act over-confident/over-optimistic with the computer, it won't be impressed - but it is. When I've approached programming problems is an aggressive way, I learn more, see better solutions and perform better. There's still a need to clean up the disasters afterwards, and it does make me feel dumb to make mistakes - but it's a more effective way of learning. For me, timidity is a mistake.

Being so timid that I don't try anything until I understand it 100% perfectly is not as effective. But I do like timidity. It's more authentic and accurate.

PS: @nostrademons: that confirms something I wondered about you... :-)

I think a reason why cockiness is enjoyed by the more thoughtful types is that it gives them an illusion of choice. By restricting the problem down to a couple of different solutions, thoughtful types figure that one has to be more optimal than the other and is therefore the more reasonable solution. The "reasoners" may be good at comparison study, but are often paralyzed when it comes to devising completely new solutions. A cocky leader, while maybe a technical ignoramus, at least narrows the choices down a bit.

> The "reasoners" may be good at comparison study, but are often paralyzed when it comes to devising completely new solutions.

"A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week."

-General George S. Patton

Yeah, right. Operation Market Garden, anyone?

Ambitious goals, insufficient supply, unexpectedly capable enemy resistance. Why, in this context, was that a "good" plan?

You are right. I used to think as a kid that technical fields would be devoid of this kind of bullshit, but it turns out that almost any type of organization of people with more than 20 members has some these types in prominent positions.

Feynman wrote about this in The Meaning of it All - he thought one of the major problems with American society today (1960s) was that people could no longer distinguish confidence and expertise. The media has to have an answer for everything, even if that answer was a total guess. He thought that people ought to look much more favorably upon someone who says "I don't know, but I know how to find out" over someone who says "This is the answer, but I can't tell you how I got it."

Has that ever been the case?

Much of the Enlightenment was centered around that ideal - that authority figures do not have all the answers, but reason provides us with a means to figure them out. And it turned out to be quite successful - it brought us modern science, and evidence-based medicine, and the industrial revolution, and most of the progress of the last four centuries.

Did you write that first and then look it up to see if it is correct?

Reminds me of this from Creating Passionate Users: http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/04/06/...

"The findings add weight to the idea that if offering expert opinion is your stock-in-trade, it pays to appear confident."

What implications does this have for online discussion?

P.S. after edit: I've related before one observational study of men picking up women in bars. When the men were prompted to act "confident," they had limited luck in getting dates. When they were told to act "arrogant" they had much better success. That's rather dismaying to me in what it says about women. I don't know if this result has been replicated (he said, to be honest at the expense of looking confident).

I guess "I don't know" is a bad answer to your question.

What about "I'd google it"?

Not just online...

It leads to dishonest, non-candid discussion.

"Better" to attack with ad hominem; wild; fallacy filled; etc. "arguments" than to show any human authenticity.

That explains the popularity of talk radio.

> I've related before one observational study of men picking up women in bars. When the men were prompted to act "confident," they had limited luck in getting dates. When they were told to act "arrogant" they had much better success. That's rather dismaying to me in what it says about women.

I think that it says something about what many men think "acting confident" means. It also says that you have to boost the signal in a noisy environment.

In many cases, folks have no basis for judging expertise. However, they often need to make decisions.

When someone says "I know", there are three possibilities. They do know, they don't and they're lying, and they don't know but don't know that they don't know. Many people think that they can pick out liars, so they're only tricked by folks who don't know what they don't know.

When someone says that they don't know, there are also three possibilities. They actually don't know, they actually do know and are lying, and they actually do know but don't know that they know. However, there's a big "why bother" here. Lying doesn't make any sense and if they're wrong about what they know, how are they going to help you decide when to believe them?

The title seems a bit misleading. Humans don't prefer cockiness to expertise, they just have a hard time differentiating between the two.

These two are inversely proportional in most cases.

I definitely disagree w/ that, there are a lot of cocky arrogant people who are also extremely smart too. It's just about finding the balance.

I think there are a lot of reasonably smart cocky/arrogant people. I think there are hardly any extremely smart ones. But there are plenty of ones that people think are extremely smart, due to the phenomenon this article describes.

Arrogance hinders people from getting smarter.

Humans don't prefer cockiness to expertise, they just have a hard time differentiating between the two.

If human beings can't recognize nuanced, tentative conclusions as a sign of expertise, they definitely have a problem.

If human beings can't recognize nuanced, tentative conclusions as a sign of expertise, they definitely have a problem.

Well, I can recognize this statement as an unsubstituted, cocky declaration rather than a nuanced, tentative conclusion.

Small adjustment: Humans definitely have a problem because they can't recognize nuanced, tentative conclusions as a sign of expertise.

Tentative conclusions can be a sign of lack of information, too. Nuanced conclusions can equally well be a sign of spending a lot of time explaining the conclusion as of expertise.

What the article said was that when people had the opportunity to observe both confidence and expertise, they preferred buying advice from advisors who were more confident and advisors who were more expert, but the confidence effect was much larger.

In other words, even when they had ample evidence with which to differentiate, they went with their biologically programmed attraction to confidence rather than their rational assessment of expertise. I'm vulnerable to it too; I just added an extremist Libertarian as a friend on Facebook, because they're just so enjoyable to talk to.

"Humans"? This was one study of students playing a particular game in a modern American university. The jump to "(all) humans" seems unjustified. But suppose the researcher might have wanted to show the effect of cockiness.

Heh. Well, I agree that it's premature to generalize definitively to humans in general, and this is a problem with psychology experiments in general: any particular experiment is necessarily very restricted in scope, and generally N is very small, so it's hard to have confidence in anything more than simple linear models.

Occam's razor suggests that it's more likely, given this one data point, that it's true of all people than that it's only true of the people that happened to be in the sample. But that clearly doesn't justify holding that view very strongly; it's based on a small amount of evidence.

I've seen a lot of this in the programming world. Certain ideas/libraries/techniques will be created and professed so emphatically by their proponent that people accept them as gospel and "the right way." In reality, they're no better (or are sometimes worse) than the alternatives (testing framework, "best practices/agile", and source control standpoints are recent such issues).

I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, since overly confident people can often be stretched into living up to their claims and genius can often result from that. I'd actually consider David Heinemeier Hansson an example of this. He has admitted his lack of experience when he started programming in Ruby and building Rails (as part of Basecamp) but his emphatic delivery of its benefits back in 2004 led to him picking up followers, gaining marketshare, learning a lot and becoming the genuinely gifted visionary we have today.

You see this affect the way start-ups are being pitched as well. Cocky sales pitches are preferred over cautious or realistic pitches (even if the buyer says otherwise).

So be cocky and back it up with expertise when they start digging. :D

I suppose it is just going to get worse and worse. We will see run away selection if women continue to choose arrogance over substance.

An arrogantocracy?

Well, usually what happens is that there's some cataclysmic event where reality intervenes and says "Uh, no, you actually don't know what you're talking about." Then all the arrogant folks die off (or permanently lose credibility) and get replaced by folks who were right all along but were more quiet about it.

We're seeing this in the newspaper industry (all the sensationalist, content-free papers are dying off because we can get sensationalist, content-free news free off the Internet) and the financial industry (all the folks who thought unlimited leverage and perpetual debt spending was a good thing are getting squeezed mighty hard by deflation, even though the government is doing its best to bail them out). Meanwhile, geekdom is becoming increasingly sexier, as women realize that geeks have the goods and the suits just have the sparkle.

>usually what happens is that there's some cataclysmic event

Don't look now, but the whole of economy is not in a great shape.

Those selections come back to bite them in the ass ungodly hard, though.

They usually get abused and/or dumped (post pregrancy) by such chaps, so there is a dampening effect on this selection for the progeny as they are raised without the support of a caring father.

This further validates my longstanding theory that the winner of any argument won't be the person who's right, it'll be the person who thinks they are right the most.

Witness the GOP and followers.

Have you ever seen Ann Coulter in action?

It's amazing how far you get on fervent belief + debate skills.

i guess fox news has got the formula down. you for forgot bill oreilly.

Arguments aren't intended to find out who is correct.

And Scientific Researchers prefer topics that grab headlines to more worthy research.

From :: http://www.twin-research.ac.uk/publications.html

Research::

* Emotional intelligence and its association with orgasmic frequency in women

Result ::

* Metro.co.uk :: Intelligent women enjoy more sex

http://www.metro.co.uk/metrosexual/article.html?Intelligent_...

According to Webster:

cockiness: boldly or brashly self-confident

confidence: a: a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances <had perfect confidence in her ability to succeed> <met the risk with brash confidence> b: faith or belief that one will act in a right, proper, or effective way <have confidence in a leader>

Big difference.

On many technical issues, confidence is necessary but not sufficient. Cockiness, OTOH, is often used when confidence doesn't exist (see "poser").

Love the subtle self-referential joke at the end.

Agreed. I laughed out loud at the punchline. Scientists are sometimes hilarious.

Genuine confidence comes from expertise gained by experience which is probably why, when people rely on information from a person with expertise that they do not possess themselves, confident experts are preferred over hesitant ones. However, like all cognitive shortcuts, it is not a perfect proxy.

The corollary to this is that if you actually _do_ know better than the people around you, you should act like an arrogant SOB or you're just going to get ignored. Having learned this I've seen an improvement in all areas of life, except that people don't like me on internet forums much:)

The guy who did this research was probably the best professor I've ever had. He taught a negotiation class in my MBA program and for every single negotiation tactic you could think of, he had a movie clip that demonstrated it. Class was always entertaining.

I don't see what most people commenting here do?

The "guessers" here were not given an option to see the "advisers" previous track record / experience - how can they prefer one to the other if they are only given the "advisers" confidence level?

That's sad, but also a bit black & white. People can be cocky and have expertise.

Anyone who lives in the world of human society knows that this is true, regardless of the linkbait title, because nobody can know everything and that confidence is one of the few metrics everyone can assess.

Human nature doesn't change.

In the experiment, people actually had information about expertise.

where? I only saw them list each "advisers" confidence level?

There were eight rounds in the experiment. The NS article says, "In the later rounds, guessers tended to avoid advisers who had been wrong previously."

Yes, humans are very superficial, most of the time.

Barack Obama's cocky, wouldn't one say? Good in times of uncertainty and change.

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