Do you ever get the sense that the more powerful people get, the more foolish they become? You’re not the only one. Four university professors concluded that power dependably breeds overconfidence, and overconfidence dependably leads to bad decisions.
The four wanted to know, are such overconfident people drawn to power, or does power itself create their overconfidence?
They had subjects write detailed accounts of times when they had had or had lacked power. They then had them answer a series of factual questions and rate how confident they were about their answers. They found that the people who had been primed to think of themselves as more powerful had more confidence in their answers than the rest—and yet their answers were actually less accurate. Yes, “confidence in one’s answers was inversely correlated with accuracy.”
