Edward's Flawed Self-Assessments

The ‘double curse’ is a phenomenon where deficits in an individual’s knowledge inhibit them from both making correct judgement and identifying that the responses they produce are inferior to those from others (Schlösser et al., 2013). Edward asserted that he was an excellent business partner after the conflict between him and Daisy and Jim, potentially without considering his possibly flawed stance regarding the disagreement. This may be due to the fact that most of the error in judging relative performance comes from the poor performers’ tendency to overestimate their abilities, which is in turn due to their poorer metacognitive skills. Krajc and Ortmann (2008) suggest that flawed self-assessments do not result from predisposed judgements
Overconfidence is the tendency of people to overestimate the accuracy of their knowledge. This tendency toward overconfidence is exacerbated among the people who exhibit the lowest skill in recognizing their own incompetence (Dunning et al., 2003). This is evident when Edward believes he has all the skills and abilities to manage the company as the CEO as well as handling design concepts as the Designer-in-Chief at the same time. Similarly, Edward is very confident that he is capable of making sound decisions and that Tom is the perfect person for the Business Manager role. This is coupled with Edward also being susceptible to the confirmation bias which as affirmed by Frost, Casey, Griffin, Raymundo, Farrell & Carrigan (2015) as an inclination to identify and interpret evidence in a way that is supportive of their pre-existing beliefs, expectations or hypotheses. As Edward remembers Tom as an outstanding footballer and has had two informal interviews with him (which seemed more of a social than a business meet), he has a confirmation bias in which he sees Tom as a junior and a friend rather than a candidate applying for the Business Manager role. This caused him to discount the fact that Tom has previously ran out of money and is currently living with his parents, which may affect detrimentally how business dealings take place in the company as he is currently penniless. Moreover, a stereotyping bias also exists between Edward and Tom as they have similar social circles and likings. Edward’s affirmation that he knows the kind of person he is looking for is greatly affected by the cultural similarities between them as individuals tend to favour people from similar over dissimilar backgrounds (Bruning & Saqib, 2013). This causes Edward to see Tom as part of their own ingroup which greatly affects his decision to hire him over other