Why confidence is more credible than expertise

KNOWING little about a subject appears to be no obstacle to persuading others to believe you.

For, if you speak with confidence, people will follow even if you have no idea what you are talking about.

Researchers said being an expert was not as important as speaking with enough conviction.

They have compiled tips for people working in a team or even thinking of trying to get on The Apprentice.

Academics at University College London and the University of Oxford found that someone’s stated confidence in their own opinion is infectious when working in a team.

When given a visual task during six experiments, more than 200 people working in pairs matched their confidence to those of a confident partner.

This happened even when it led to the wrong group decision after someone pretended to know more then they really did.

The study in the journal Nature Human Behaviour found that the less reliable person could be too confident while the more reliable person could be not confident enough.

This tendency can lead to problems in real life, it warned.

Co-author Dr Bahador Bahrami, from UCL, said: ‘The study invites us to reconsider confidence as a social tool. For example, research has shown finance professionals, who work in competitive environments, are more confident than the general population.

‘It also helps explain why politicians seem so confident – they may be tapping into how people use confidence as a marker of credibility.’

Dr Dan Bang, from UCL’s Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging, who led the study, said: ‘Making a decision collectively is most effective if the person with the most expertise expresses their opinion with the most confidence.

‘If my opinion is more reliable than yours, then I should also be more confident.

‘But it’s difficult to express that effectively if you don’t know whether the person you’re working with is habitually overconfident or too modest.’