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The Cognitive Illusions Of Confidence

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The Cognitive Illusions Of Confidence
Human beings suffer from unwarranted overconfidence and do not adequately understand and factor in the roles of their own ignorance, luck, and uncertainty in the world around them. We suffer from various cognitive illusions that feed into our subjective confidence of our understanding, judgments, intuitions, and decisions. While confidence is a positive attribute that people often value in others, Kahneman points out that confidence is not driven by a logical evaluation using statistics and algorithms, rather it “reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it” (Kahenman 212). Overconfidence is driven, in addition to various other factors, by our illusions of understanding reflecting our inability to factor

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