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So, if you have a group of people who say the same kinds of things,
that don't express their doubts.
Share all the same information,
exchange reasons why everyone's right.
That'll tend to make groups overconfident.
Yeah, or feel like we got this.
Right.
We totally nailed it.
And it turns out that overconfidence and
feeling really successful when you aren't necessarily,
poses a lot of problems as well.
So, as we've seen up to this point,
groups create a lot of problems,
partially by creating agreement,
by forcing people to obey whether they think their course of action is good or not,
by enforcing silence even when people privately disagree.
And all of these things you could create their own problems as we've seen,
but they're also tie together and produce
something that is also problematic which is overconfidence.
And groups can actually be,
because they're in agreement,
and because everyone thinks they're on the same page.
They can start to think that they have the right answer,
when the process that got them there maybe wasn't very sound.
But I would think confidence at some level is a good thing to promote action.
Yeah.
So, if we believe in what we're doing and committed to what we're doing,
that's going to motivate effort and maybe get people on board to work hard.
Yeah. And it's true there's a lot of evidence for that.
And psychologists called that collective efficacy.
Right. Exactly.
Because it sounds positive, but basically,
confident group set more difficult goals,
and they persist longer,
they are more resilient.
See [inaudible].
The problem is that you can persist in the wrong direction,
and you can be persistent until you fail.
And actually have some evidence for that,
from a study I did a few years back.
In which we actually followed teams who were working over a period of 15 weeks.
And we actually measured which teams were the most confident right from the start.
And what we found was that the teams that develop that confidence early,
then actually put off meeting.
And because they have all the answers, right?
And they failed to exchange perspectives,
and they even failed to have the kinds of conflicts that they needed to have
early on to really figure out who's doing what for instance,
or what should the topic of our project be.
Basic debates that would have been really good to have early on.
They had to putting off because they were overconfident,
and then at the end this really came back to haunt them,
because all of these issues then came to the fore when it was too late to deal with them.
And so, overconfidence can really
suppress the exchange of perspectives that we need for creativity.
Ready fire arm.
Yeah. So, if you develop that confidence too early
on the basis of maybe a poor understanding, or.
On the basis of the fact they right.
Or there were real misgivings and no one's expressing them.
And so, you're right.
The agreement is based on the fact that nobody's saying anything.
Called consensus.
Right and then that ends up being at odds with [inaudible].
So, instead the early period of lack of confidence in effect is saying,
Hey, that allows conflict,
it allows disagreement, it allows figuring out.
And that confidence can make us feel as if we don't have to do any of that.
Exactly.
We can just proceed.
So, there was a famous book by Andy Grove,
he is the CEO of Intel.
And he used to say that "Only the paranoid survive."
Maybe overconfidence is bad.
A little bit of paranoia can be a good thing.
So, as we've heard before,
creativity really requires effort,
and you really need people especially in
a team really pulling their weight and doing what they need to do to get the job done.
Unfortunately, overconfidence works against that because,
if we're so successful,
and if we have all the right answers,
and if we all agree, then why bother thinking?
Why bother questioning?
Why bother exploring alternative possibilities?
And so overconfidence really works against team creativity by making groups complacent.
Jeffrey LoewensteinAssociate Professor of Organizational Behavior
Jack GoncaloProfessor
