Are you pretty confident that your diet is a healthy option for your? Are you confident in the outcome of your upcoming job interview? And how confident are you that you will have enough saved for retirement? Whatever your level of confidence, you might want to reconsider whether you should be as confident as you are, or whether you are just telling yourself a narrative that you like and that makes you feel comfortable with the decisions you have made.
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman writes the following about confidence:
“Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. 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.”
We feel confident in our choices, decisions, and predictions about the future when we can construct a coherent narrative. When we have limited information and experience, it is easy for us to fit that information together in a simplified manner that creates a logical story. The more conflicting and complex information and knowledge we obtain, the more diverse experiences and viewpoints we adopt, the harder it is to construct a simple narrative, and the harder it is for our story about the world to align in a way that makes us confident about anything.
A high level of confidence doesn’t represent reality, and it may actually reflect a lack of understanding of reality and all of its complexities. We are confident that our diet is good when we cut out ice cream and cookies, but we don’t really know that we are getting sufficient nutrients for our bodies and our lifestyles. We don’t really know how we perform in a job interview, but if we left feeling that we really connected and remembered to say the things we prepared, then we might be confident that we will land the job. And if we have a good retirement savings program through our job and also contribute to an IRA, we might feel that we are doing enough for retirement and be confident that we will be able to retire at 65, but few of us really do the calculations to ensure we are contributing what we need, and none of us can predict what housing or stock markets will look like as we get closer to retirement. Confidence is necessary for us to function in the world without being paralyzed by fear and never-ending cycles of analysis, but we shouldn’t mistake confidence in ourselves or in other people for actual certainty and knowledge.
Novel Learning 