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Its well documented that people generally are overconfident of their abilities - a recent paper in Nature speculates how it became an adaptive trait:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0909/0909.4043.pdf
The evolution of overconfidence
Dominic D. P. Johnson & James H. Fowler
Confidence is an essential ingredient of success in a wide range of domains ranging from job performance and mental health to sports, business and combat. Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence—believing you are better than you are in reality—is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success.However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition. In contrast, unbiased strategies are only stable under limited conditions. The fact that overconfident populations are evolutionarily stable in a wide range of environments may help to explain why overconfidence remains prevalent today, even if it contributes to hubris, market bubbles, financial collapses, policy failures, disasters and costly wars
The finding that the optimal level of bias increases with the magnitude of
uncertainty is especially intriguing. It suggests that we should expect extreme levels of
overconfidence (hubris) or underconfidence (fear) precisely when we are dealing with
unfamiliar or poorly understood strategic contexts. We predict that—where the value of
a prize sufficiently exceeds the costs of competing—overconfidence will be particularly
prevalent in some very important domains that have inherently high levels of
uncertainty, including: international relations (where events are complex, distant, and
involve foreign cultures and languages), rare or unpredictable phenomena (such as
natural disasters and climate change), novel or complex technologies (such as the
internet bubble and modern financial instruments), and new and untested leaders, allies,
and enemies. Although overconfidence may have been adaptive in our past, and may
still be adaptive in some settings today, it appears that we are likely to become
overconfident in precisely the most dangerous of scenarios.
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0909/0909.4043.pdf