Hazards of Confidence

Daniel Kahneman, emeritus professor of psychology and of public affairs at Princeton University and a winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, writes in the NYT on the hazards of confidence:

"The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true."

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