Rationally Speaking is a presentation of New York City skeptics dedicated to promoting critical thinking, skeptical inquiry, and science education.

For more information, please visit us at n.ycceptics.org.

Welcome to Rationally Speaking, the podcast where we explore the borderlands between reason and

nonsense. I'm your host, Julia Galef, and I'm in the office of today's guest, Professor Don Moore.

Don is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business.

He's a professor of management of

organizations. And his, one of the things he's best known for, the way I first heard of him,

is as the co-author of the excellent textbook, Judgment in managerial decision-making with

Max Bezerman. It's a great intro, very comprehensive intro to decision-making and heuristics and biases and how they affect

actual real-world decision-making. Don's research specializes, one of his areas of focus,

is on overconfidence, and that's what we're going to be talking about in today's episode. Don,

welcome to rationally speaking. Thanks. I'm delighted to be with you.

So how confident are you that you are an expert in overconfidence?

Only moderately.

Excellent. You are, you taught yourself well.

I strive towards good calibration in all of my confidence judgments.

That's quite a motto.

So before we dive into the meat of the episode, I think all of my confidence judgments. That's quite a motto.

So before we dive into the meat of the episode, I think most people colloquially are used to thinking of overconfidence as basically being someone who thinks too highly of themselves.

Like they have an overly high opinion of their skill or their intelligence or charm or whatnot.

Or possibly overconfidence means being too confident that some endeavor of yours will succeed.

Is that what you and your subfield mean by the term or do you have some more precise academic meaning?

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