Over-confident individuals can often be poor in decision making with potentially disastrous consequences, revealed a study.

‘Over-confident individuals can often be poor in decision making with potentially disastrous consequences.’

Subsequently, people indicated how confident they felt about their response being correct. The researchers then measured how good people were in evaluating their own accuracy in a process called metacognition. 




"The more confident people were about their performance, the higher the activation in brain areas such as the striatum, a brain area often associated with reward processing," said lead author Pascal Molenberghs from the Monash University in Victoria, Australia.
"However, too much confidence was associated with lower metacognitive ability," added Fynn-Mathis Trautwein from the Max Planck Society - a non-profit association in Germany.
When combined, the results indicated that although being confident entails a reward-like component, it can lead to overconfidence which in turn can undermine decision making, the researchers concluded in the paper published in the journal Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
Source-IANS