overconfident

Overconfident is an adjective describing a person who holds an excessive or unwarranted level of certainty in their beliefs, judgments, or abilities. It is a common manifestation of overconfidence, a cognitive bias in which confidence exceeds accuracy or foundation in evidence.

Various cognitive processes contribute, including the overconfidence effect, the Dunning–Kruger effect, optimism bias, and motivated reasoning. People may confuse confidence with accuracy, overestimate their competence, or discount disconfirming information due to selective attention or self-serving bias.

Contexts range from everyday decisions to professional settings. In business, politics, medicine, or science, overconfidence can lead to underestimated risks, insufficient testing, or costly strategic errors. It can be reinforced by social feedback, authority dynamics, or desire to appear decisive.

Mitigation approaches include soliciting and valuing dissenting opinions, employing structured decision-making tools, probabilistic forecasting, and checklists. Training aimed at calibration, feedback loops, and pre-mortems can help align confidence with evidence.

In research, overconfidence is studied as a bias that can skew judgment and decision-making; researchers assess calibration by comparing expressed confidence with observed outcomes.