Overconfidence metrics used in psychology for decades are actually just measuring how skilled a person is.
People labeled as overconfident by standard tests are often just more capable than the metrics assume. These widely used measurements fail to separate a person's actual ability from their belief in that ability. This error suggests that much of the famous research on cognitive biases might be misidentifying high skill as a personality flaw. Many individuals thought to be arrogant or delusional may actually have an accurate grasp of their superior talents. It calls into question the entire industry of training programs designed to correct overconfidence in the workplace.
Widely-Used Measures of Overconfidence Are Confounded With Ability
SSRN · 4468920
Measures of overconfidence are frequently used to assess biases in people’s beliefs regarding their own abilities and correlates of those biases. Proposed correlates of overconfidence include greater narcissism, lower task anxiety, higher status, greater savings, more planning, and numerous other constructs. Research on these correlates typically explicitly or implicitly claims the associations with overconfidence are not attributable to ability (i.e., latent inputs enabling successful task perf