When I took a social psychology class long ago, they mentioned that the most significant cultural difference between Canadians and Americans was that Americans take overconfidence as a sign of competence whereas Canadians perceive it as an attempt to intimidate or take advantage of someone.
Seems to apply to this article as well. Maybe 'high-class' overconfident people become more convincing as wealth disparity widens due to the magic sauce they must obviously possess to be so rich in the first place. It's like Gob's bragging from Arrested Development: "The guy in the $4,000 suit is holding the elevator for a guy who doesn’t make that in three months. Come on!"
I'm having a hard time finding a paper about the US/Canada difference now though, so maybe I'm wrong.
Anecdote from when I was in China. My friend and I were walking down the street in Jinan (a big city though not one of the Major Chinese cities - think Pittsburgh in the US) when a yellow Ferrari fishtailed around the corner, squealing its tires and speeding away down the street. My immediate reaction - which I imagine to be the average American reaction - was "what an asshole". However, the Chinese around us on the street had quite a different reaction: "wow what a cool guy/car". Not really sure what this means about the perceptions of displays of status between the two cultures, but it's something that has stuck with me ever since.
When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.
The paradox of wealth is that people tend to want it to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth solely as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.
A while ago, my wife and I were in the mood for dumplings so we headed to a nearby shopping center here in Southern California with a lot of Asian shops and restaurants and not enough parking spots. It's popular among locals and visiting tourists, including nouveau riche from mainland China.
It's a Sunday, it's lunch time, and it's packed. After going up and down a couple rows, I get lucky and see the reverse lights on a minivan light up just as I'm approaching the end of a crowded row. So I stop and wait.
While I'm waiting, I look in my rear-view mirror and notice this very new (no plates) white BMW aggressively weaving around other other cars stopped in the lane waiting for something to open up. Just as the spot clears, the white BMW races around me to take the spot. I'm stunned. I'm not a violent person nor even a particular strong person and haven't been in a fistfight since elementary school. But I'm ready for bloodshed. I lay on the horn.
A young handsome fashionably dressed Chinese guy wearing sunglasses exits the car on the driver's side. His attractive young fashionably dressed wife, also wearing sunglasses, gets out on the passenger side. She pulls out their young son, also well dressed and wearing sunglasses. Obliviously, they start walking toward the dumping joint where we're planning to eat.
I turn to my wife, incredulous: "Can you believe this? Did you see that asshole?" I'm not Chinese. My wife is.
"Asshole?" she replied. "In China, that guy would be a hero."
She didn't seem particularly upset by the turn of events. So I just laughed, put my vendetta in the hands of karma, and went in search of another parking spot.
Same in India. Wealth is seen as a status symbol. The cultures value it, and whoever has more is considered to be high status.
Its not hard to see why though. In industrializing countries with a lot of income inequality, wealth is rare, and anyone who has that is seen as either getting it through hard work, or getting it via their parents' hard work.
BTW, Americans are hardly better, see all the yatches and private jets that corporate executives own.
I've just came back from a road trip in the US, and what struck me compared to Europe is that people didn't have luxurious cars (apart from a bunch of asian kids cruising Yellowstone in obnoxious sport cars). Big SUV were commonplace, but I didn't see as many people showing off luxurious cars as I do in Europe. I don't really know if there is any truth from this subjective observation but it made me thinking. It goes against the common stereotype saying that it's totally fine to boast one's wealth in the US, whereas Europeans are more shy regarding money matters. This isn't my experience.
When it comes to wealth specifically, I've always noticed this about American culture.
They have this myth of the ultra rich everyday man, who despite their immense wealth and power, are just as relatable and humble as the rest of us. They wear blue jeans and you see them joking with the cashier, even though they could buy the supermarket chain.
In many other cultures that would be the epitome of hypocrisy. It's perceived as cheap and an outright lie. Being rich actually obligates you to look rich. It's expected. You can be kind, you can be generous, you can be helpful, but don't hide that you're rich.
Although it might be more pronounced in Asia, even in Europe the rich don't try as hard to be relatable as in America. Somehow Americans find displays of wealth almost offensive.
Another anecdote, my Russian, very Dutchified colleague and friend bought a very expensive and nice watch with many survival/hiking functions (compass, altitude meter etc.). The watch was unobtrusive and minimalistic (and black). We both though it was very functional and a sign of good taste and an eye for quality. His Russian family though did not understand how he could have spend that amount of money on a watch that was not "expensive looking".
I’m not so sure you have it right. If that happened to an American child or teenager they would think it was awesome. An adult would not be so amused especially if their child was standing there.
I’d think they were an asshole. BMW drivers are assholes, I know I used to drive one.
On Youtube, Daily Driven Exotics is one of the largest automotive channels and I would suppose you would consider all the antics you see on that channel to be quite obnoxious. Plenty of Americans consider everything they see of that channel as "wow what a cool guy/car".
>my immediate reaction - which I imagine to be the average American reaction - was "what an asshole". However, the Chinese around us on the street had quite a different reaction: "wow what a cool guy/car"
Is "good for him he's enjoying what his nice car has to offer" not an option?
Confirmation bias here, but I find this fascinating. I'm Canadian living in the US, and see these overconfident people who are incompetent in the industry and it drives me banana, but across several previous jobs (again, in the US), everyone seemed completely oblivious to it and thought these people were awesome (they were absolutely not).
In one case, I watched a high executive tank a company into the ground (provably, with numbers to back it up that it was as a direct result of their own decisions) and got promoted 3 times for it. Eventually left their job and took an even higher position at another, bigger company.
> the most significant cultural difference between Canadians and Americans was that Americans take overconfidence as a sign of competence whereas Canadians perceive it as an attempt to intimidate or take advantage of someone.
Interesting...
I'm an American, but apparently more Canadian in attitude about this. I've always taken overconfidence (or, worse, braggadocio) as a sign of incompetence.
My anecdotal experience agrees with your point. I'm a Brazilian living in UK, and have worked for 2 different big American companies (Dell Computers and Ford Motors). It's very obvious that, comparing to both Brazilian and British cultures, Americans appear to value confidence far more, to the point of coming across as bullish when you're not familiar with it.
I can anecdotally confirm the American side. My manager values confidence to the point where he sees it as the number one signal for actual competence. I started acting more confident and aggressive to appease him, and realized that everyone else has already been doing it all along.
How is that sustainable? Does the scheme lack a feedback loop of sorts or why doesn't he (or the stereotypical American people of similar attitude) realise that the overconfident-looking people aren't necessarily that competent? I mean, competence is a hard quality: you immediately know who's lacking it when you see someone who really, truly has competence. You can only fake it till so far.
In my experience as an American (32 years) most Americans fight hard for the rich. If you tell someone: "Their rich because their parents were rich." you will almost always be met with resistance and it usually comes from an individual of a lower class. I don't know why it is but that's just how it is. It was amazing to see so many poor people voting for Trump and then when you tell them a few facts about Trump and how completely opposite his life has been to theirs they not only resist it but in some cases get very angry.
There was a book written along these lines a few years ago [1]. We've had an election just here in Australia and there is definitely evidence of the same thing now occurring here.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01EEQ9BSW
Presumably you mean Justin. His father, Pierre, was supremely confident and for good reason. He was in a class by himself as an intellectual and politician.
Distrust of overconfident people is a skill that needs to be taught. A class on this might include film clips of famous con men and failures, from Bernie Madoff to Shai Agassi.
Here's Bernie Madoff, after he was a crook but before he was caught.[1]
Here's Shai Agassi, before Better Place went bust spending about half a billion on their battery swap system and putting about 30 cars on the road.[2]
It can be done, but it's not worth it. Battery swapping was a bet against more battery capacity and faster charging.
Even industrial battery swapping, for forklifts, straddle carriers, AGVs, and such, which was once popular, seems to be on the way out. The machines can get through a workday on one charge now, then charge up while parked. Five years ago there were videos of clever battery swap machines.[1] Not so much now.
A BS detection class would be interesting. It's too easy to look at videos of famous liars like Madoff or Bill Clinton and say its easy to tell they are lying because of their body language, in hindsight.
I would love to videos of non famous people telling lies about themselves and try to see if I could spot the liars at greater than average percentages.
Maybe that's an idea for a fun website....
Of course event this course wouldn't help you when the liars actually believe their own bullshit, which seems to be fairly common among the most successful fraudsters.
this might not be quite what you're looking for, but the Calling Bullshit site/course [0] is pretty great. It's not about reading body language, but instead about finding issues in arguments as laid out in the media, scientific literate, and elsewhere. Really, really excellent examples, including some very recent ones.
Humans have extremely skewed perception of risks and rewards. As such, "more confidence" doesn't necessarily mean "overconfidence", but might actually mean "less underconfidence". For example, talking to strangers and/or crowds carries almost no actual risks, and has a lot of potential benefits. On the other hand, driving is quite risky, but we don't think twice about it...
But psychologically, most people have their perception anchored to the average behavior, so things that are actually rational (meeting strangers) appears as "overconfidence" and things that are actually quite reckless (driving, not exercising, eating sugar, drinking alcohol) we think of as "normal".
Public speaking holds a high risk of embarrassment in front of a crowd (although it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy). It’s telling that humans care more about risk to their image than risk to their bodies, as a major difference from most other less social species.
I had an interview experience not too long after I finished college. I don't remember the specifics, but it was for an entry level administrative assistant role. I had plenty of experience in retail, customer service, event planning and working at the front desk of my college - so totally relevant stuff.
The interviewer asked me why I was so confident. And why I had the nerve to want to dig into the terms of the job (salary, growth opportunities and the like - I was a late stage candidate).
Full disclosure - I can't think of a time where I have been perceived as arrogant at all. I am generally well-liked and personable.
The interviewer seemed to have some sort of implicit bias - I think she really didn't think that black people should be confident in a professional environment. I can't imagine that she would have taken similar offense to a white guy asking those sorts of questions.
> The interviewer seemed to have some sort of implicit bias - I think she really didn't think that black people should be confident in a professional environment. I can't imagine that she would have taken similar offense to a white guy asking those sorts of questions.
Well that's your bias though right. I mean maybe she was just intimidated, stupid, and/or human...
I just came out of a situation where a guy on the train was looking at me with the most disgusted look possible. To the point where I was checking myself in the reflection to see if I had a booger or something. Being white I have to assume he was just a weird dude.
I honestly can't imagine what life is like in the shoes of a minority, but I wonder how often false positives show up. I mean you are assuming the other person is a racist, which is a heavy accusation.
I faced similar attitudes in interviews early in my career. It has nothing to do with skin color, and all to do with prejudices about people without much career experience.
In one case, one interviewer basically told me that I lied about how much I made in an internship. (I didn't lie.)
Now that I'm on the other side of the table, I can tell you that the hardest interviews to run are for recent college graduates. It requires a lot of "would I know this back then" thinking.
I interview plenty of recent graduates, most of whom come off as "over-confident", to their credit, they most definitely have great pedigrees and compare well with their peers and will likely be great additions. However, they down-the-line have no clue what they are talking about, or how to do the job they are applying for...regardless of gender/race/etc.
It's entirely possible she didn't think that way. But prior to and after that experience I did have people (outside of an interview context) that explicitly told me I should not have my level of confidence due to their perceived racial expectations. So I could be overly sensitive to the whole thing.
>“We may also need to punish overconfident behavior more than we do,” she said.
Who is "we?" Maybe overconfident behavior is adaptive in a world where risk-taking works out enough of the time. Not all overconfidence takes the form of "I rationally know I can't do it but I'll try anyway," it is often closer to, "I rationally don't know whether or not I can do it, but I'll assume that I can and press on."
When faced with a task, there's a difference between believing that you can eventually learn and work it out given time and effort, and believing that you're already capable of doing it. What's frustrating is when the only people who are given the opportunity to fail over and over again and eventually get it right are the ones who never recognize that they can, do, and have failed.
I think it’s very often not adaptive. Eg some parents are very confident in their ability to conduct medical research in their spare time, and the result is measles outbreaks.
Those parent's aren't "conducting medical research," they are believing what they are hearing from sources they trust more than medical researchers (their own friends and families). In fact, it would take more self-confidence in their ability to do research in order for them to learn the information necessary to step back from their community evaluate the risks on their own.
Survivor bias combined with a very large initial sample size leads to it looking like risk-taking works out most of the time regardless of the actual odds. This makes it very hard to figure out whether that risk-taking is really adaptive or not.
> Not all overconfidence takes the form of "I rationally know I can't do it but I'll try anyway," it is often closer to, "I rationally don't know whether or not I can do it, but I'll assume that I can and press on."
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
When you will still be wealthy regardless of the outcome of any decision you make, you can try more things and take more risks. This fosters as confidence. If you are competent in your risk-taking, it shows up. If you are not, it manifests as overconfidence.
Wealth does not create overconfidence; it only reveals it.
I would argue the other way around: The more wealthy you are...
- the less competent you need to be. You have more capital to do the work for you.
- the less you are affected from random problems, as you can spread your risk.
If you are in the lower echelon, one miss-step or random event outside of your control can bring you in a position where it is much harder to recover from.
Your claims do not disagree with my claims that you are replying to. It's true that if you are poor, any misstep you make is more likely to make for a truly bad outcome.
Can you share some evidence for that claim? It doesn't seem intuitively true to me, but I could be convinced that higher risk-tolerance tends to be rewarded. I'd be curious to hear more about where your idea comes from.
My argument is the flip side of (and generalization of) the usual claim that poor people are discouraged to try anything entrepeneurial.
Another competing claim could be that rich people are honestly less competent than poor people. I could easily argue against that one; IQ and conscientiousness are highly positively correlated with income, based on numerous sociological studies. People who dispute this fact have an agenda.
I feel like it stands to reason that, were a person who could be a successful entrepreneur given all the resources/time necessary to start a business, they would have a higher chance of trying at the very least. There's all sorts of people who are stuck making wages to provide their family and can't afford to take a risk. Those without the means who do end up taking the risk can fall quite hard.
From what I've personally seen the people who get away with incompetence the most are high-charisma people. I've countless times seen people with a certain "reality distortion field" kind of charisma spew utterly inane nonsense in front seasoned professionals who really do know better and they just nod and swallow it. Charisma seems to bypass the rational mind completely. It tells the brain stem "the person speaking is an alpha primate" and the neocortex switches off.
The inverse is also true. People with low charisma can say incredibly wise, rational, and insightful things and they're often ignored.
IMHO a lot of what is wrong with our world can be explained by this. At the same time it also creates a contrarian opportunity to benefit by calling bullshit on charismatic charlatans and paying attention to quieter people who know what they're talking about.
That's plausible. A good explanation would be that in general consequences back then were a lot more lethal. So the guy who was overconfident beyond their abilities and rushed into battle, or into a hunting situation, or a conflict with a neighbor, would probably end up dead pretty quickly.
So if they were expressing confidence, and still around, it would likely be pretty directly correlated with actual ability.
It's a bit of a just-so story but it has some resonance to it.
That makes sense but maybe we don't need that explanation. It could really be possible that the best-designed decision making robot would use confidence as a heuristic. It would fail in the same ways we fail, but it would probably perform worse in general if you removed that bias.
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Seems to apply to this article as well. Maybe 'high-class' overconfident people become more convincing as wealth disparity widens due to the magic sauce they must obviously possess to be so rich in the first place. It's like Gob's bragging from Arrested Development: "The guy in the $4,000 suit is holding the elevator for a guy who doesn’t make that in three months. Come on!"
I'm having a hard time finding a paper about the US/Canada difference now though, so maybe I'm wrong.
3. Rich man in the car paradox.
When you see someone driving a nice car, you rarely think, “Wow, the guy driving that car is cool.” Instead, you think, “Wow, if I had that car people would think I’m cool.” Subconscious or not, this is how people think.
The paradox of wealth is that people tend to want it to signal to others that they should be liked and admired. But in reality those other people bypass admiring you, not because they don’t think wealth is admirable, but because they use your wealth solely as a benchmark for their own desire to be liked and admired.
http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/the-psychology-of-mone...
It's a Sunday, it's lunch time, and it's packed. After going up and down a couple rows, I get lucky and see the reverse lights on a minivan light up just as I'm approaching the end of a crowded row. So I stop and wait.
While I'm waiting, I look in my rear-view mirror and notice this very new (no plates) white BMW aggressively weaving around other other cars stopped in the lane waiting for something to open up. Just as the spot clears, the white BMW races around me to take the spot. I'm stunned. I'm not a violent person nor even a particular strong person and haven't been in a fistfight since elementary school. But I'm ready for bloodshed. I lay on the horn.
A young handsome fashionably dressed Chinese guy wearing sunglasses exits the car on the driver's side. His attractive young fashionably dressed wife, also wearing sunglasses, gets out on the passenger side. She pulls out their young son, also well dressed and wearing sunglasses. Obliviously, they start walking toward the dumping joint where we're planning to eat.
I turn to my wife, incredulous: "Can you believe this? Did you see that asshole?" I'm not Chinese. My wife is.
"Asshole?" she replied. "In China, that guy would be a hero."
She didn't seem particularly upset by the turn of events. So I just laughed, put my vendetta in the hands of karma, and went in search of another parking spot.
Its not hard to see why though. In industrializing countries with a lot of income inequality, wealth is rare, and anyone who has that is seen as either getting it through hard work, or getting it via their parents' hard work.
BTW, Americans are hardly better, see all the yatches and private jets that corporate executives own.
They have this myth of the ultra rich everyday man, who despite their immense wealth and power, are just as relatable and humble as the rest of us. They wear blue jeans and you see them joking with the cashier, even though they could buy the supermarket chain.
In many other cultures that would be the epitome of hypocrisy. It's perceived as cheap and an outright lie. Being rich actually obligates you to look rich. It's expected. You can be kind, you can be generous, you can be helpful, but don't hide that you're rich.
Although it might be more pronounced in Asia, even in Europe the rich don't try as hard to be relatable as in America. Somehow Americans find displays of wealth almost offensive.
I’d think they were an asshole. BMW drivers are assholes, I know I used to drive one.
On Youtube, Daily Driven Exotics is one of the largest automotive channels and I would suppose you would consider all the antics you see on that channel to be quite obnoxious. Plenty of Americans consider everything they see of that channel as "wow what a cool guy/car".
Is "good for him he's enjoying what his nice car has to offer" not an option?
In one case, I watched a high executive tank a company into the ground (provably, with numbers to back it up that it was as a direct result of their own decisions) and got promoted 3 times for it. Eventually left their job and took an even higher position at another, bigger company.
No one seems to notice this. Its insane.
Interesting...
I'm an American, but apparently more Canadian in attitude about this. I've always taken overconfidence (or, worse, braggadocio) as a sign of incompetence.
Again, it's just my experience.
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Which is precisely what the rich people want them to think.
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Here's Bernie Madoff, after he was a crook but before he was caught.[1]
Here's Shai Agassi, before Better Place went bust spending about half a billion on their battery swap system and putting about 30 cars on the road.[2]
What can you see there?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auSfaavHDXQ
[2] https://www.ted.com/talks/shai_agassi_on_electric_cars/trans...
This thing: https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-shuts-down-battery-swap-prog...
Even industrial battery swapping, for forklifts, straddle carriers, AGVs, and such, which was once popular, seems to be on the way out. The machines can get through a workday on one charge now, then charge up while parked. Five years ago there were videos of clever battery swap machines.[1] Not so much now.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvqbw0UT5pM
I would love to videos of non famous people telling lies about themselves and try to see if I could spot the liars at greater than average percentages.
Maybe that's an idea for a fun website....
Of course event this course wouldn't help you when the liars actually believe their own bullshit, which seems to be fairly common among the most successful fraudsters.
[0] https://www.callingbullshit.org/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Tell_the_Truth
But psychologically, most people have their perception anchored to the average behavior, so things that are actually rational (meeting strangers) appears as "overconfidence" and things that are actually quite reckless (driving, not exercising, eating sugar, drinking alcohol) we think of as "normal".
The interviewer asked me why I was so confident. And why I had the nerve to want to dig into the terms of the job (salary, growth opportunities and the like - I was a late stage candidate).
Full disclosure - I can't think of a time where I have been perceived as arrogant at all. I am generally well-liked and personable.
The interviewer seemed to have some sort of implicit bias - I think she really didn't think that black people should be confident in a professional environment. I can't imagine that she would have taken similar offense to a white guy asking those sorts of questions.
Well that's your bias though right. I mean maybe she was just intimidated, stupid, and/or human...
I just came out of a situation where a guy on the train was looking at me with the most disgusted look possible. To the point where I was checking myself in the reflection to see if I had a booger or something. Being white I have to assume he was just a weird dude.
I honestly can't imagine what life is like in the shoes of a minority, but I wonder how often false positives show up. I mean you are assuming the other person is a racist, which is a heavy accusation.
In one case, one interviewer basically told me that I lied about how much I made in an internship. (I didn't lie.)
Now that I'm on the other side of the table, I can tell you that the hardest interviews to run are for recent college graduates. It requires a lot of "would I know this back then" thinking.
Who is "we?" Maybe overconfident behavior is adaptive in a world where risk-taking works out enough of the time. Not all overconfidence takes the form of "I rationally know I can't do it but I'll try anyway," it is often closer to, "I rationally don't know whether or not I can do it, but I'll assume that I can and press on."
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
~ George Bernard Shaw ~
Wealth does not create overconfidence; it only reveals it.
- the less competent you need to be. You have more capital to do the work for you.
- the less you are affected from random problems, as you can spread your risk.
If you are in the lower echelon, one miss-step or random event outside of your control can bring you in a position where it is much harder to recover from.
(Edited formatting)
My argument is the flip side of (and generalization of) the usual claim that poor people are discouraged to try anything entrepeneurial.
Another competing claim could be that rich people are honestly less competent than poor people. I could easily argue against that one; IQ and conscientiousness are highly positively correlated with income, based on numerous sociological studies. People who dispute this fact have an agenda.
The inverse is also true. People with low charisma can say incredibly wise, rational, and insightful things and they're often ignored.
IMHO a lot of what is wrong with our world can be explained by this. At the same time it also creates a contrarian opportunity to benefit by calling bullshit on charismatic charlatans and paying attention to quieter people who know what they're talking about.
So if they were expressing confidence, and still around, it would likely be pretty directly correlated with actual ability.
It's a bit of a just-so story but it has some resonance to it.