Strategically delusional

We aim to test the hypothesis that overconfidence arises as a strategy to influence others in social interactions. To address this question, we design an experiment in which participants are incentivized either to form accurate beliefs about their performance at a test, or to convince a group of oth...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Experimental economics : a journal of the Economic Science Association 2020-09, Vol.23 (3), p.604-631
Main Authors: Soldà, Alice, Ke, Changxia, Page, Lionel, von Hippel, William
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavioral/Experimental Economics
Bias
Costs
Deception
Economic theory
Economic Theory/Quantitative Economics/Mathematical Methods
Economics
Economics and Finance
Experiments
Feedback
Game Theory
Hypotheses
Influence
Microeconomics
Operations Research/Decision Theory
Original Paper
Social and Behav. Sciences
Social interaction
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Summary:We aim to test the hypothesis that overconfidence arises as a strategy to influence others in social interactions. To address this question, we design an experiment in which participants are incentivized either to form accurate beliefs about their performance at a test, or to convince a group of other participants that they performed well. We also vary participants’ ability to gather information about their performance. Our results show that participants are more likely to (1) overestimate their performance when they anticipate that they will try to persuade others and (2) bias their information search in a manner conducive to receiving more positive feedback, when given the chance to do so. In addition, we also find suggestive evidence that this increase in confidence has a positive effect on participants’ persuasiveness.
ISSN:1386-4157
1573-6938
DOI:10.1007/s10683-019-09636-9