“Doubt is an unpleasant condition. But certainty is absurd.”
- Voltaire
Question: What do the following have in common?
Answer: These are all circumstances in which the public has proved ready, willing and able to pay big bucks for displays of confidence.
Confidence may not be called a virtue, but it is certainly treated as one by many people. People love watching other people who are confident, and they instinctively trust people who display lots of confidence. The bright side in the Neolithic Village environment is confidence is a good indicator of competence, and trusting in confidence pays off well because things get done more quickly and simply. A person well practiced at a task can do it quickly, easily and they can be trusted to get the job done. The well practiced person doing the task looks confident. Over thousands of generations trusting in confidence has become a partly hard-wired thinking - an instinct.
We civilized people, however, don't live in the Stone Age environment; and the confidence-competence link has been affected in two ways. First, one person can rarely judge the competence of another person picked at random because there are so many kinds of tasks people do. Second, the image of confidence can be gamed. One of the tools of modern technology is diverse ways of communicating with many people, and one way of using the opportunity these new communication technologies provide is to create an appearance of confidence, an appearance which is divorced from the competence it is supposed to be linked to.
The manipulation of the confidence-competence link leads to trouble. There can be confidence being displayed, but little competence backing it up. If there is no link, at some point those investing in this image of another person's competence are brought up against the harsh reality of an unexpected failure. This condition of confidence, but no competence, occurs frequently enough that it is a common story element, as well as something to be cautious about in the real world.
In the Neolithic Village environment many people learn to do many different tasks. For example, most of the village knows how to hunt, gather food and prepare it for eating. This familiarity means it is easy to judge another person's competence at the various tasks of day-to-day living. How well a man throws a spear is easy for everyone to see; how well a person cooks is easy for everyone to judge.
As mankind has become more civilized, the day-to-day work has become much more diverse and specialized. One result is that it is usually difficult to watch another person doing their job and be able to judge how well they are doing it. There are spectacular exceptions, such as professional sports, but if I'm asked to judge the competence of, say, an auto painting robot programmer, I'll be scratching my head a whole lot.
One result of this growing inability for the average person to be able to judge the competence of another person's performance is the rise of the image-making industry: many groups of people who make their living helping other people project confidence. This group is wide ranging: It runs from people who help others with public speaking, to public relations (PR) agencies, to people who set up certification programs that others can pass and thereby display their competence.
The techniques of image-making are diverse. While many of these techniques are effective at linking confidence to competence, a few are the opposite - more effective at stroking the instinct to trust in a display of confidence that is exhibited, but has no connection to competence.
An obvious cost of confidence-competence disconnect is mistakes made because the confident person is not competent. There are many dramatic examples of this, again, it makes for good story telling. One example from the 1960’s is the play/movie The Music Man. A more recent example is 2012 movie The Dictator. Another cost is that competence is not rewarded, and if it's not rewarded those who are competent will leave a particular activity in search of opportunities that are more rewarding. Usually if a person is competent in one area they can retrain and become competent in some other area that is more rewarding. An example of this is the fate of two technical support people who have different levels of confidence and competence. Tech A is competent but doesn’t display confidence. His answer is, “I’m not sure. Let me get back to you on that.” Tech B displays confidence but really doesn’t understand. His answer is, “Problem, you say? Check that it’s plugged in and reboot the system.” In many environments Tech B is going to thrive in the tech support department while Tech A gets frustrated and moves on.
When the image-competent remain in charge and keep making more and more mistakes, the outcome is first more and more expense and waste, then discouragement and disenfranchisement. The community, when it sees what is happening, first gets frustrated, then discouraged, then stops caring (disenfranchisement). One contemporary example of this is giving up on calling tech support. Another is of qualified leaders in business and military declining to become politicians – these people look at the cesspool and decide to steer clear. Their choices to stay out of a disintegrating situation produces waste for the community because we don’t get the most competent members performing in a role they can be good at.
A related secondary cost is corruption. The more these image-competent leaders are supported, and allowed to disconnect from harsh reality, the less likely it is that their choices will not be influenced by personal gain (which is something the image-competent understand well).
In Neolithic Village times watching a person display confidence at an activity was a signal that the person could be trusted. In the modern civilized environment what are the signals that a person, or institution, can be trusted? The primary tool for determining trust is research: researching the person’s history at doing this activity. How much experience has this person had as this task? How successful at it has he or she been? Making this research happen more quickly is the purpose of things such as resumes, references, and certifications. In the modern environment these serve as much better signals of competence than confidence does.
Waste is the cost of following confidence that is not linked with competence. This is the Cost of Confidence, and it can be a big cost. The alternative to following confidence is to learn to be skeptical and do independent research and analysis to find out if the confidence another person displays is merited. This is a learned skill. We as a community need to spend community effort on teaching it. These days, doing this kind of research is much easier than ever, but being diligent about doing it takes training. The more we learn how to be skeptical and how to research the claims of the confident, the more closely confidence can once again be linked to competence.