It sounds crazy but I've seen this in action. At my last job they brought in a guy who was unmitigated disaster for a technical leadership position.<p>In short, he was the most arrogant, buzz-word filled SOB I ever had the displeasure of meeting,<p>After he finally got booted when people realized he didn't know a damn thing about technology I flat out asked the VP of engineering: "What did you ever see in him?".<p>He said: "You know, you're going to think I'm crazy, but he was exactly the same in the interview as he was around here daily, and I really thought that cockiness would mean he would take the lead on issues and be able to guide the younger guys".<p>So remember that kids, if you want to be seen as leadership material, thoughtfulness and pensiveness are not the way to go about it.<p>Just look at CTOs at companies you respect for further proof and see how many timid figures you find.
Feynman wrote about this in <i>The Meaning of it All</i> - he thought one of the major problems with American society today (1960s) was that people could no longer distinguish confidence and expertise. The media has to have an answer for everything, even if that answer was a total guess. He thought that people ought to look much more favorably upon someone who says "I don't know, but I know how to find out" over someone who says "This is the answer, but I can't tell you how I got it."
"The findings add weight to the idea that if offering expert opinion is your stock-in-trade, it pays to appear confident."<p>What implications does this have for online discussion?<p>P.S. after edit: I've related before one observational study of men picking up women in bars. When the men were prompted to act "confident," they had limited luck in getting dates. When they were told to act "arrogant" they had much better success. That's rather dismaying to me in what it says about women. I don't know if this result has been replicated (he said, to be honest at the expense of looking confident).
In many cases, folks have no basis for judging expertise. However, they often need to make decisions.<p>When someone says "I know", there are three possibilities. They do know, they don't and they're lying, and they don't know but don't know that they don't know. Many people think that they can pick out liars, so they're only tricked by folks who don't know what they don't know.<p>When someone says that they don't know, there are also three possibilities. They actually don't know, they actually do know and are lying, and they actually do know but don't know that they know. However, there's a big "why bother" here. Lying doesn't make any sense and if they're wrong about what they know, how are they going to help you decide when to believe them?
I've seen a lot of this in the programming world. Certain ideas/libraries/techniques will be created and professed so emphatically by their proponent that people accept them as gospel and "the right way." In reality, they're no better (or are sometimes worse) than the alternatives (testing framework, "best practices/agile", and source control standpoints are recent such issues).<p>I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, since overly confident people can often be stretched into living up to their claims and genius can often result from that. I'd actually consider David Heinemeier Hansson an example of this. He has admitted his lack of experience when he started programming in Ruby and building Rails (as part of Basecamp) but his emphatic delivery of its benefits back in 2004 led to him picking up followers, gaining marketshare, learning a lot and becoming the genuinely gifted visionary we have today.
You see this affect the way start-ups are being pitched as well. Cocky sales pitches are preferred over cautious or realistic pitches (even if the buyer says otherwise).<p>So be cocky and back it up with expertise when they start digging. :D
This further validates my longstanding theory that the winner of any argument won't be the person who's right, it'll be the person who thinks they are right the most.
And Scientific Researchers prefer topics that grab headlines to more worthy research.<p>From :: <a href="http://www.twin-research.ac.uk/publications.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.twin-research.ac.uk/publications.html</a><p>Research::<p>* Emotional intelligence and its association with orgasmic frequency in women<p>Result ::<p>* Metro.co.uk :: Intelligent women enjoy more sex<p><a href="http://www.metro.co.uk/metrosexual/article.html?Intelligent_women_enjoy_more_sex&in_article_id=656133&in_page_id=8" rel="nofollow">http://www.metro.co.uk/metrosexual/article.html?Intelligent_...</a>
According to Webster:<p>cockiness: boldly or brashly self-confident<p>confidence: a: a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances <had perfect confidence in her ability to succeed> <met the risk with brash confidence> b: faith or belief that one will act in a right, proper, or effective way <have confidence in a leader><p>Big difference.<p>On many technical issues, confidence is necessary but not sufficient. Cockiness, OTOH, is often used when confidence doesn't exist (see "poser").
Genuine confidence comes from expertise gained by experience which is probably why, when people rely on information from a person with expertise that they do not possess themselves, confident experts are preferred over hesitant ones. However, like all cognitive shortcuts, it is not a perfect proxy.
The corollary to this is that if you actually _do_ know better than the people around you, you should act like an arrogant SOB or you're just going to get ignored. Having learned this I've seen an improvement in all areas of life, except that people don't like me on internet forums much:)
The guy who did this research was probably the best professor I've ever had. He taught a negotiation class in my MBA program and for every single negotiation tactic you could think of, he had a movie clip that demonstrated it. Class was always entertaining.
I don't see what most people commenting here do?<p>The "guessers" here were not given an option to see the "advisers" previous track record / experience - how can they prefer one to the other if they are only given the "advisers" confidence level?
Anyone who lives in the world of human society knows that this is true, regardless of the linkbait title, because nobody can know everything and that confidence is one of the few metrics everyone can assess.<p>Human nature doesn't change.