Overconfidence: From PacMan to ‘Ghost’ Torpedoes

Most 80’s kids will recall Atari- a household name at the time, which birthed a series of wildly popular video games from PacMan to Star Wars. An 80’s kid myself, I was intrigued to discover the use of video games in military training- a fact I chanced upon in a behavioral study on overconfidence and conflict. The authors describe how “the US Army used a modified commercial Atari game Battle-zone for gunnery training”. It also highlighted another war game run by the US Department of Defense back in 2002, which played a fundamental role in “examining scenarios” for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The game came with a whopping price tag of $250 million.

Video games are far from the only interesting premise in this paper, which studies what behavioral scientists broadly term overconfidence. The authors posit that the human predisposition towards overconfidence, or what they call, ‘positive illusions’, has negative implications for conflict decisions. In a lab environment, they asked 200 volunteers to play the role of the leader of a fictitious country, where newly discovered diamond resources lay along a disputed border.

The volunteers were given different alternatives in the computer game- from trading and negotiating with opponents for additional resources, to ‘waging war’, wherein attacks could be launched on opponents. Volunteers were also asked to rate their ‘pre’ and ‘post’ likelihoods of success- and give saliva samples at different stages, to measure testosterone levels.

The authors discovered that players who made higher-than-average predictions of their performance, or in other words, were overconfident, launched more unprovoked attacks against competitors. These players were also more likely to be men, who not only possessed greater overconfidence than their female peers, but also tended towards greater levels of narcissism.

While some naysayers might react to the above with a big fat “so what, how is this at all relevant to conflict?”, still others may allege that what happens in a lab simply does not translate to the real world. These naysayer concerns are addressed in forthcoming paragraphs- but first, an analysis of the phenomenon of overconfidence.