It’s not really self-deception—it’s selective attention. If you’re committed to a course of action, information about possible failure modes is only relevant to the extent that it helps you avoid them. And for the most useful results in life, most failures don’t happen so rapidly that you don’t get any warning, or so catastrophic as to be uncorrectable afterwards.
Humans are also biased towards being socially underconfident, because in our historic environment, the consequences of a social gaffe could be significant. In the modern era, though, it’s not that common for a minor error to produce severe consequences—you can always start over someplace else with another group of people. So that’s a very good example of an area where more factual information can lead to enhanced confidence.
A major difference between the confident and unconfident is that the unconfident focus on “hard evidence” in the past, while the confident focus on “possibility evidence” in the future. When an optimist says “I can”, it means, “I am able to develop the capability and will eventually succeed if I persist”. Whereas a pessimist may only feel comfortable saying “I can” if they mean, “I have done it before.”
Neither one of them is being “self-deceptive”—they are simply selecting different facts to attend to (or placing them in different contexts), resulting in different emotional and motivational responses. “I haven’t done this before” may well mean excitement and challenge to the optimist, but self-doubt and fear for the pessimist. (See also fixed vs. growth mindsets.)
Humans are also biased towards being socially underconfident, because in our historic environment, the consequences of a social gaffe could be significant.
It’s not really self-deception—it’s selective attention. If you’re committed to a course of action, information about possible failure modes is only relevant to the extent that it helps you avoid them. And for the most useful results in life, most failures don’t happen so rapidly that you don’t get any warning, or so catastrophic as to be uncorrectable afterwards.
Humans are also biased towards being socially underconfident, because in our historic environment, the consequences of a social gaffe could be significant. In the modern era, though, it’s not that common for a minor error to produce severe consequences—you can always start over someplace else with another group of people. So that’s a very good example of an area where more factual information can lead to enhanced confidence.
A major difference between the confident and unconfident is that the unconfident focus on “hard evidence” in the past, while the confident focus on “possibility evidence” in the future. When an optimist says “I can”, it means, “I am able to develop the capability and will eventually succeed if I persist”. Whereas a pessimist may only feel comfortable saying “I can” if they mean, “I have done it before.”
Neither one of them is being “self-deceptive”—they are simply selecting different facts to attend to (or placing them in different contexts), resulting in different emotional and motivational responses. “I haven’t done this before” may well mean excitement and challenge to the optimist, but self-doubt and fear for the pessimist. (See also fixed vs. growth mindsets.)
I wish I could upmod you twice for this.