The social transmission of overconfidence.

We propose and test the overconfidence transmission hypothesis, which predicts that individuals calibrate their self-assessments in response to the confidence others display in their social group. Six studies that deploy a mix of correlational and experimental methods support this hypothesis. Evidence indicates that individuals randomly assigned to collaborate in laboratory dyads converged on levels of overconfidence about their own performance rankings. In a controlled experimental context, observing overconfident peers causally increased an individual's degree of bias. The transmission effect persisted over time and across task domains, elevating overconfidence even days after initial exposure. In addition, overconfidence spread across indirect social ties (person to person to person), and transmission operated outside of reported awareness. However, individuals showed a selective in-group bias; overconfidence was acquired only when displayed by a member of one's in-group (and not out-group), consistent with theoretical notions of selective learning bias. Combined, these results advance understanding of the social factors that underlie interindividual differences in overconfidence and suggest that social transmission processes may be in part responsible for why local confidence norms emerge in groups, teams, and organizations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A status-enhancement account of overconfidence.

In explaining the prevalence of the overconfident belief that one is better than others, prior work has focused on the motive to maintain high self-esteem, abetted by biases in attention, memory, and cognition. An additional possibility is that overconfidence enhances the person's social status. We tested this status-enhancing account of overconfidence in 6 studies. Studies 1-3 found that overconfidence leads to higher social status in both short- and longer-term groups, using naturalistic and experimental designs. Study 4 applied a Brunswikian lens analysis (Brunswik, 1956) and found that overconfidence leads to a behavioral signature that makes the individual appear competent to others. Studies 5 and 6 measured and experimentally manipulated the desire for status and found that the status motive promotes overconfidence. Together, these studies suggest that people might so often believe they are better than others because it helps them achieve higher social status.

Social influences on spatial memory.

Three experiments were performed to examine the joint influences of spatial and social categories on memory for maps. Participants learned a map and descriptive information about small town businesses and, afterward, completed distance estimation and person-location matching tasks. Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that social (i.e., racial) and spatial information influenced memory, but not equivalently: Social information affected distance and matching task performance, whereas spatial information affected only distance estimates. This pattern was obtained for racially segregated and racially integrated neighborhoods and when the salience of the spatial categories was heightened. The social information influence did not generalize to political affiliation categories (Experiment 3). These results demonstrate that spatial and nonspatial information may interact to structure mental maps but that the salience of the social category is critically important. Furthermore, these findings suggest the applicability of a model of category salience (Blanz, 1999) for interactive products of spatial experiences--in this case, map learning. Norms for this article may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.