This Should Explain a Few Things

Geven and Plomin also found that children with a greater belief in their own abilities often performed better at school, even if they were actually less intelligent.  They also concluded that same held true for athletes, with ability playing a less role than confidence.

 

Every play chicken?  The winner isn't the better driver, but the one convinced the other guy will budge first.

 

The same holds true for crime both blue and white collar - essentially, the confident people know they can take what they want because they expect nobody has the sack to stop them or the awareness to even know they're being swindled.

 

If you doubt that, play the stock market - or better yet, hire a pollster.

This is the whole "people are sheep" perspective common to many delusionally confident, aggressive, dismissive and highly successful people.  They make a ton of money selling books and offering training seminars essentially trying to tell people how to be like them.

 

Genetics isn't the be-all of our behaviour; we can change it, when we put our minds to it.  It pays, however, to accept what our starting point is.

 

Why on earth would we have people genetically predisposed to feel they are better than others and more than a match for anyone they face off against?

 

This makes evolutionary sense and can be witnessed throughout the animal kingdom.  Leaders of the pack are aggressive, full of bluster and ready to scare off or pick fights with potential opponents or shout down potential predators.  In return, they get the pick of the food, the best mate or mates, etc.

 

Nature has designed societies that have tough confident folk who play the role of security, while other people play differing roles - like food gathering and prep, innovation, etc. 

What nature didn't do was design complex societies where people have diverse roles and confidence (as well as our inclination to defer to it) simply isn't enough to tackle the challenges at hand.

 

You can't, for instance, beat your chest and scare off a severe weather event.  Nor shout and motivate an organization to be more innovative.  Yet, because of hard-wiring, it's these aggressive boss-types who get ahead.

 

Helps explain why our democracy is crumbling and our social model is failing, doesn't it?

 

Maybe it's time we pull ourselves away from the cockfight and start heeding Chicken Little a bit.