Overconfidence Bias

Named in How To Take Smart Notes as one of the Mental Models behind why planning fails: academics and students systematically underestimate how long writing will take, even under their own worst-case estimates. In the cited study, only 45% of students finished within the time they were “99% likely” to make under any condition they thought possible (Buehler, Griffin, and Ross 1995) — and reminding them of past misses changed nothing, because “experience doesn’t seem to teach students anything.” The book notes wryly that it “has nothing to do with being a student” but “with being human”: even the researchers who study the Overconfidence Bias admit they fall for it too (Daniel Kahneman 2013, 245ff). The lesson the book draws is to be sceptical of outcome-focused planning and to picture the actual work required instead.

Where this appears

• How To Take Smart Notes — the bias behind chronic underestimation of writing time; grounds the book’s argument against outcome-focused planning.