Imagine you’re on a plane and the pilot suddenly becomes incapacitated. If you were shown a short video of a pilot landing that plane, how confident would you be about doing it yourself? Surprisingly, a recent study shows that almost 50% of men polled said they feel confident they could. The results demonstrate how easy it is for people to become overconfident in their skills, with very little information or training. One explanation is the Dunning-Kruger effect — when those who know very little on a topic are highly confident in their expertise, but as a person discovers the complexities of it, they lose confidence in their ability. It’s only when someone genuinely becomes an expert on that topic that this confidence is regained. Another factor was gender, with the study finding men to be more confident than women in every experiment. So, in reality how many people could actually land a plane after merely watching a short video? The answer is zero.
