by Staff Writers
Los Angeles CA (SPX) Sep 19, 2011
Edinburgh UK (SPX) Sep 19, 2011 Harbouring a mistakenly inflated belief that we can easily meet challenges or win conflicts is actually good for us, a new study suggests. Researchers have shown for the first time that overconfidence actually beats accurate assessments in a wide variety of situations, be it sport, business or even war.
However, this bold approach also risks wreaking ever-greater havoc. The authors cite the 2008 financial crash and the 2003 Iraq war as just two examples of when extreme overconfidence backfired.
A team from the University of Edinburgh and the University of California, San Diego used a mathematical model to simulate the effects of overconfidence over generations. It pitted overconfident, accurate, and underconfident strategies against each other.
A paper published in Nature shows that overconfidence frequently brings rewards, as long as spoils of conflict are sufficiently large compared with the costs of competing for them. In contrast, people with unbiased, accurate perceptions usually fare worse.
The implications are that, over a long period of time the evolutionary principal of natural selection is likely to have favoured a bias towards overconfidence. Therefore people with the mentality of someone like boxer Mohammad Ali would have left more descendents than those with the mindset of film maker Woody Allen.
The evolutionary model also showed that overconfidence becomes greatest in the face of high levels of uncertainty and risk. When we face unfamiliar enemies or new technologies, overconfidence becomes an even better strategy.
Dr Dominic Johnson, reader in Politics and International Relations at the University: "The model shows that overconfidence can plausibly evolve in wide range of environments, as well as the situations in which it will fail. The question now is how to channel human overconfidence so we can exploit its benefits while avoiding occasional disasters."
University of Edinburgh
All About Human Beings and How We Got To Be Here
Comment on this article via your Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, Hotmail login.
Study suggests methylation and gene sequence co-evolve in human-chimp evolutionary divergence
Cold Spring Harbor, NY (SPX) Sep 19, 2011
Scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) and the University of Southern California (USC) have published the first quantitative evidence supporting the notion that the genome-wide "bookmarking" of DNA with methyl molecules - a process called methylation - and the underlying DNA sequences corresponding with these marks, have co-evolved in a kind of molecular slow-dance over the 6 million ... read more
|The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2011 - Space Media Network. AFP and UPI Wire Stories are copyright Agence France-Presse and United Press International. ESA Portal Reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement,agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy Statement|