In this lesson, we will go over the overconfidence and underconfidence effects.

(00:00) Intro

(00:10) What is the overconfidence effect?
There are three ways that the overconfidence effect can manifest. They are: overestimation, overplacement, and overprecision.

(00:19) What is overestimation?
Overestimation is the tendency to overestimate one's ability to complete a task. In other words, you think that you're better at completing a task than you actually are. For example, say a student completes a test and they think they score 90% when they actually scored 70%.

(00:42) What is overplacement?
Overplacement is the tendency to believe that one's performance is better than others. In terms of overplacement, you need to think about ranks. When employing overplacement, you're ranking your ability compared to others and ranking yourself too high in your ability to complete a task compared to others. For example, say a student believes they have the top grade in their class, but in reality they actually are in the bottom half of the class. This is overplacement.

(01:13) What is overprecision?
Overprecision is the tendency to be excessively certain in the accuracy of one's beliefs. This means that there are some beliefs that you hold in which you are actually too confident that they are correct. For example, a student is 90% confident that everyone in the class passed the exam when, in reality, 20% of the students failed. This student’s confidence was too high and they should not have been that confident in their belief that everyone passed because, after all, 20% of the students failed.

(01:54) What is the underconfidence effect?
The underconfidence effect is very similar to the overconfidence effect, but it's the opposite. The underconfidence effect is different in that there's only two types of underconfidence: underestimation and underplacement.

(02:13) What is underestimation?
Underestimation is the tendency to underestimate one's ability to complete a task, so you think you're worse at a task than you actually are. For example, a student overestimates the amount of time it will take them to complete an easy homework assignment. Now, this may sound confusing because the word “overestimates'' is used here, but think about it: If this is an easy homework assignment that only takes five minutes to do, but the student estimates that it would take them 30 minutes to complete it, they have overestimated the amount of time it would take for them to complete this easy task. And the reason why they overestimated the time is because they underestimated their ability to complete the task.

(03:02) What is underplacement?
Underplacement is the tendency to believe that one's performance is worse than others. So when ranking your ability to complete a task, you rank yourself lower than your actual ranking. For example, a student believes that they are worse than most people at a difficult task, like juggling. Say that you’re asked about your juggling skills, but you have no juggling abilities. Because of your inability to juggle, you think you're worse at juggling than most people. Well, the reality is that most people don't know how to juggle, so you’re not actually worse at juggling than most other people. So because of this, you have ranked yourself lower in your ability to juggle than what your actual ranking is.

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