Overconfidence and Self-Assessment Biases

Groups the phenomena of the psychology atlas whose central finding concerns systematic miscalibration in judging one's own knowledge, ability, or the accuracy of one's own plans and predictions, a body of research most associated with the confidence-calibration literature (Lichtenstein, Fischhoff and Phillips on calibration) and Justin Kruger and David Dunning's 1999 unskilled-and-unaware-of-it study. Belongs here: the Overconfidence Effect, the general finding that subjective confidence in one's own judgments systematically exceeds objective accuracy; the Dunning-Kruger Effect, the specific finding that low performers most overestimate their own competence; the Illusion of Control, misjudging one's own degree of control over an outcome actually due to chance; the Illusion of Validity, unwarranted confidence in a prediction that follows from a coherent-seeming story rather than genuine predictive power; the Illusion of Explanatory Depth, overestimating how well one understands a mechanism until asked to explain it in detail; the Planning Fallacy and the Plan Continuation Bias, underestimating how long, costly or risky one's own plan will actually be, and continuing a plan past the point new information should trigger a revision; the Optimism Bias and the Pessimism Bias, systematically over- or under-estimating one's own future outcomes relative to others; the Impact Bias and the End-of-History Illusion, misjudging how one's own future feelings will differ from present feelings; the Restraint Bias, overestimating one's own ability to resist a future temptation; the Bias Blind Spot, seeing oneself as less biased than other people; the Curse of Knowledge and the Introspection Illusion, over-attributing one's own current knowledge to others, and mistaking a confident introspective report for reliable insight into one's own mental processes; and the Hot-Cold Empathy Gap, misjudging how one's own future behavior in a different visceral state will differ from present behavior. Every entry here concerns a distortion in assessing one's own knowledge, ability, plans or future states specifically; a distortion in assessing an outside claim or piece of evidence is filed under confirmation and motivated-reasoning biases instead, and every other decision or judgment bias not yet split into a dedicated subcategory stays under decision-making and judgment biases.