A third of men believe they are capable of making an emergency landing of a plane: why do they think this?
The Dunning Kruger effect or the overconfidence bias
When emergency landing a plane, do you really need to demonstrate how difficult the maneuver is for an inexperienced person? A demonstration by The Conversation.
And as pilot Patrick Smith summed it up for The Washington Post: "There's a 0% chance anyone can do it. Do people think they can do a transplant? No. So why do they think they can land?"
This is what's called the Dunning Kruger effect (theorized by two American psychologists in the 1990s, David Dunning and Justin Kruger), or an overconfidence bias. People with little expertise in a subject are nevertheless convinced they are highly competent. Conversely, the most competent underestimate themselves. Why? The less we know about a field, the less we are aware of its complexities. Whereas those who have acquired knowledge of a subject know the difficulties it presents.
More realism on the women's side
Why, as in surveys concerning the ability to land a plane, do men overestimate their abilities? Quoted by the Tribune de Genève, Morgane Rudaz, a doctoral student in gender studies at the University of Geneva, explains that "women tend to demonstrate practical realism and recognize that it takes a wealth of knowledge to pilot and land a plane. On the other hand, some men tend to overestimate their skills and expertise, which stems from gender-based and differentiated socialization."
Are women less confident than men?
School, family, gender norms, societal expectations... This situation could also be the result of a system that makes women less confident than men. This is what Morgane Dion, co-founder of Plan Cash and author of the book "Nice Girls Don't Succeed: A Fighting Manual for Equality at Work," demonstrates. "It's not so much that we lack self-confidence, but more that the world doesn't trust us and we know that someone will jump at the slightest crack to discredit us," she explains. "As a result, men speak with more confidence and boldness, even when they have very little data to support their statements, while women will first want to accumulate a lot of data and be sure they can support what they say."
Finally, several studies have shown that women are no less confident than men, but because they are judged and criticized more than men, especially at work, they strategically adapt their behavior. "This is not surprising, given that research shows that women who behave assertively often experience the opposite effect, leading them to rationally self-censor," notes Naomi Schoenbaum, a professor at GW Law, in the columns of Forbes magazine.
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