Matching confidence levels in team may be detrimental

London, May 27 (IANS) Do you try to match your confidence levels with another person while making decisions in a team? Beware, it can backfire if one person has more expertise than the other and cause harm to the team, finds a new study.

The study showed that "confidence matching", meant that people with different levels of expertise performed poorly: the less reliable person was too confident, while the more reliable person was not confident enough.

This degree of stated confidence in one's opinion is infectious when working in a team, and can blur the boundary between well-informed and poorly-informed opinion, and be sometimes detrimental.

"Making a decision collectively is most effective if the person with the most expertise expresses their opinion with the most confidence," said Dan Bang from University College London.

"We found that even when an expert is paired with someone who lacks expertise, both participants will align their confidence levels so that their opinions will carry more equal weight," Bang added.

For the study, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, the team conducted six experiments involving 202 participants in Iran and Britain with the researchers asking people to perform a visual perceptual task.

The results showed that people matched each other's degree of confidence, rather than calibrate it to the reliability of their own opinions, even when offered a financial incentive.

However, when pairs were closely matched in their level of expertise, confidence matching helped boost their performance by reducing miscommunication, the researchers noted.

"One possible explanation is that confidence matching serves to ensure equal influence on group decisions, perhaps as a way to avoid conflict, or as a way to defuse responsibility. Alternatively, people may struggle to learn from their past failures or successes, and find it easier to mirror each other's confidence levels," Bang added.

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