“A lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on”. It’s a well-known saying. But a more accurate version would be: “A confidently told lie is halfway round the world before the truth has got its boots on”.
Because basically, we humans are far more likely accept and believe information delivered confidently. By a confident person, or by a source using confident language etc.
And as the modern world has shown us repeatedly, this regularly leads to undesirable outcomes.
Humans trusting confident people over unconfident ones is an established phenomenon. The ‘Confidence heuristic’ states that when two (or more) people are involved in a decision making process where they know different things, confidently expressed arguments are perceived as conveying better information, which determines the decision.
Why would this tendency come about? Well, humans are ultrasocial, and during our evolutionary development, most of our information about the world came from our tribe, i.e. other people.
So, If ancient humans heard someone confidently declare “There’s a predator coming!”, instinctively believing them was a valuable survival trait.
Humans are also hierarchical. We have social status, and our communities often have leaders, who tend to be confident sorts.
In the wild, where there’s danger everywhere, a tendency to unthinkingly believe the confident leader and quickly do what they say, is another useful survival trait.
On a more personal level, much of our thinking about, and perception of, others tends towards the egocentric; we relate what they do and say to our own experiences, because that’s typically what our brain has to work with.
If when we’re confident it’s for good reason, logically someone else being confident must have good reason to be too.
There are caveats, like credibility; a megaphone-wielding street preacher, bellowing that the world’s about to end, may seem more confident than a friend recommending a restaurant is, but the latter will carry much more weight.
Similarly, the manner of communication affects confidence assessments. Someone may be very confident in their claims/ideas, but if they deliver them hurriedly, or quietly, we’re less likely to recognise this confidence. Slow, clear speech is associated with confidence.
So, there are many reasons why we trust confident people. Now, here are some why we shouldn’t.
Confidently delivered information may be more persuasive, but that doesn’t mean it’s correct, even if the confident person genuinely believes it is.
Even that’s not certain; humans have long been able to deceive. It’s extremely possible for certain people to feign confidence convincingly, even if conveying the most meaningless guff.
But ‘wrong confidence’ need not mean deceit. For one, confidence is linked to intelligence. We’ve all met someone who confidently lectures others on how the world works, despite being wrong about literally everything.
It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with low ability/experience/knowledge about something often significantly overestimate their abilities/expertise regarding it.
This is because the ability to recognise your intellectual limits requires sufficient intelligence. Lacking that, you won’t question your (limited) understanding, so can spout laughable nonsense with utmost confidence.
Meanwhile, higher intelligence makes you more aware of what you don’t know, leading to imposter syndrome, diminishing confidence. Suddenly, mistrust of experts and rejections of their conclusions makes more sense.
However, someone with perfectly normal intelligence may still end up excessively confident, if they have a particularly privileged existence. An affluent, pampered life, particularly during childhood, can mean never suffering the consequences of being wrong.
So, you could end up believing you aren’t wrong. Ever. Your brain’s never had the opportunity to recognise this occurrence. So, you’ll deliver every utterance with unshakeable confidence, purely because it’s you saying it.
This happens later in life too. As stated, much of what we understand about the world, and ourselves, comes via information from other people.
So, if you achieve success in your field legitimately, and your confidence is therefore ‘valid’, you can still end up surrounded by those who agree with and support you, i.e. people who validate everything you say or think.
Big celebrities, surrounded by whole networks of people dedicated to serving them and keeping them happy, regularly develop massive egos, which often leads to them confidently, and publicly, stating the most ridiculous things.
This is important. We live in a highly interconnected, increasingly complex society, where innumerable people and worldviews end up overlapping constantly. So, someone who is objectively, unquestionably wrong, but still unshakeably confident can end up convincing many others that they’re right.
Often by providing easy answers for complex modern issues, particularly ones that ‘confirm’ pre-existing worldviews or prejudices. This makes them more high-profile, thus more legitimate and convincing, so they gain more support and followers, and the cycle continues.
Left unchecked, it can end up with individuals with no abilities or redeeming traits beyond unshakeable confidence being put in charge of entire countries. And that won’t end well for anyone. You can be confident in that conclusion.
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