McAfee: Overconfidence evolved as a feature to attract social coalitions
Andrew McAfee · Ep 70: Andrew McAfee on the Science Behind the World's Most Valuable Companies · Joe Lonsdale · Nov 15, 2023 · at 22:17
MIT scientist Andrew McAfee explains the evolutionary psychology behind cognitive bias and overconfidence to Joe Lonsdale.
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“Robert Trivers, the most important evolutionary biologist since Darwin. Trivers said the reason we are overconfident is because confidence is valuable for individual members of a very social species. If you believe that you're really, really good, you will appear that way to other people and they will want it to have you as part of their coalitions. So we are overconfident. It seems like a bug. It's a feature. It's a feature for a species. As social as ours.”
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