Phil Fernbach

Why is it that you believe this in trying to understand all of the nuance to their position?

Yeah, Rob makes another really wonderful point here.

I like to think about intellectual humility as the goal.

What that means is that we have calibration between how well we understand something and how well we think we understand that thing.

Underconfidence is sort of the other pole of

relative to the illusion of understanding, our feeling of understanding is even lower than it should be.

And that can be equally detrimental to people's experience.

Moreover, human beings tend to like people who are confident and express confidence.

If you think about the leaders in your organization or our political leaders, your favorite athlete,

they tend to exude a lot of confidence, maybe even more confidence than is warranted.

And people like that and they respond to it.

So people who are chronically underconfident can suffer a great deal because they're not put into positions of power or leadership.

They can lose their self-efficacy and so on.

So if you are a person who tends to be chronically underconfident, I think it's really important to appreciate that the world is really complicated.

And it's okay not to know everything and to understand everything.

And a lot of the people around you who are going around expressing tremendous confidence about whatever it is, it's not because they necessarily have much more mastery than you do in the topic.

It might be that their psychology pushes them to be more confident.

And so getting comfortable with the fact that we can't know everything and that the world is really complex and it's important for us to take positions on issues regardless of that is really critical.

What we're trying to do is act with wisdom or prudence, right?

We want to do the best that we can given the situation.