According to a new study, a person's tendency to be overconfident increases when he or she thinks intelligence is fixed and unchangeable.
Washington State University researcher Joyce Ehrlinger has found that people tend to maintain their overconfidence by concentrating on the easy parts of tasks while spending as little time as possible on the hard parts of tasks.
He, however, added that the people, who hold a growth mindset: meaning they think intelligence is a changeable quality, tend to spend more time on the challenging parts of tasks and consequently their confidence level are more in line with their abilities.
Ehrlinger's research, conducted with Ainsley Mitchum of Florida State University and Carol Dweck of Stanford University, found that a little bit of overconfidence can be helpful, but a larger amount of overconfidence can lead the people to make bad decisions and miss out on opportunities.
The researchers noted that overconfidence is a documented problem for drivers, motorcyclists, bungee jumpers, doctors and lawyers.
The research showed that forcing fixed theorists to really look at the difficult as well as the easy parts of an intellectual task shook their confidence, inspiring more accurate impressions of their performance.
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"Education is perhaps the best way to advance opportunity and emerging evidence suggests that the benefits of teaching a growth mindset for improving grades are particularly strong for students in stigmatized groups based on race or gender," Ehrlinger said.
The study is published in the journal of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.