“It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously, but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.” — Daniel Kahneman
For years, we told ourselves a story about how Noise/Flash Diversionary Devices (NFDDs, aka “flashbangs”) work: When they are discharged, the bad guys will have a startle response that will delay their efforts to fight the police, allowing a window of opportunity to take them into custody safely.
And it works. I have seen NFDDs make a biker gang member faint and a drug dealer curl up in a ball. Total and instant incapacitation.
It works...until it doesn’t. Some people, especially career criminals who have prepared for police intervention, can have very little startle response. I have seen guys have a NFDD go off at their feet and they sit and watch SWAT storming their house just like they are watching a movie.
Still, we had unwavering confidence in using NFDDs.
Why?
Nobel prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman laid it out very nicely: How confident we feel about something has nothing to do with the actual probability of our predicted outcome happening. Instead, confidence is purely a function of how coherent the story is that we created in our heads to explain to ourselves how the outcome would happen.
The trap of over-confidence
The “story” about how NFDDs work is compelling — so we were confident in them.
If we can tell ourselves a compelling story about how our decision will result in the desired outcome, we will feel confident about our decision. This is the trap of over-confidence.
There is usually a single desired outcome we are striving for, and we can easily tell ourselves a story about how our decision will lead to it.
But there are infinite undesirable outcomes, and it becomes very difficult to tell a story about how our decision will result in failure. The picture gets too murky. Our “story-making” abilities, which are what inform our confidence levels, are simply not up to the task of predicting the many ways in which our endeavors could fail. So, we ignore the chance of failure, or at the very least underestimate it.
The trap of under-confidence
The inverse of over-confidence is also true; under-confidence can just as easily impair our decisions. That is, the absence of a coherent narrative about how our decision will result in success can undermine our confidence in our plan, even though we are taking appropriate action.
Complex problems require multiple decisions, none of which will clearly lead to success on their own. The more complex the problem, and the more decisions required in the process of solving it, the harder it is to build a story about how decisions will lead to success.
This leads to us feeling under-confident in making decisions on difficult problems, particularly for initial steps that are furthest removed from the desired outcome.
It’s not that what we want to do won’t work, we just can’t see it clearly enough to build a story. And that erodes our confidence.
Confidence is not an assessment of probability. It is a feeling. And just like we don’t make decisions based on feelings of anger or elation, we shouldn’t make decisions based on feelings of confidence.
We still use NFDDs, we just have a more realistic expectation of their effectiveness that is based on actual probability, not just our “confidence.”
