A lot of the world’s biggest problems are what you might call crises of overconfidence.
Big, powerful nations conquer small, unstable ones expecting that invading troops will be greeted as liberators. On Wall Street, people who should know better buy dubious investments under the assumption that they’ll be able to unload them before the bubble bursts. And on Main Street, people already deep in debt purchase houses they can’t afford, reassuring themselves that prices can only go up. Meanwhile, the 7 billion humans on Earth keep pumping heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere without seriously considering how their children and grandchildren will deal with the resulting climate disruption.
How on Earth did humans become such a self-deluding species? Why are we constantly fooling ourselves into doing things that are stupid not just in hindsight, but — given all the facts we have available — really didn’t seem like such a good idea even at the time?
It just may be that we’re victims of our evolutionary legacy. It’s quite possible, a pair of political scientists suggest in the Sept. 15 Nature, that back in the Stone Age, people who overestimated their own prospects for success actually benefited by it.