Higher socioeconomic class encourages overconfidence — which, inanely, people respect

© 2019 Peter Free

 

30 May 2019

 

 

Consider the self-entitled parasites, who run the United States

 

In light of these findings:

 

 

People who see themselves as being in a higher social class may tend to have an exaggerated belief that they are more adept than their equally capable lower-class counterparts, and that overconfidence can often be misinterpreted by others as greater competence in important situations, such as job interviews, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

 

“Advantages beget advantages. Those who are born in upper-class echelons are likely to remain in the upper class, and high-earning entrepreneurs disproportionately originate from highly educated, well-to-do families,” said Peter Belmi, PhD, of the University of Virginia and lead author of the study.

 

“Our research suggests that social class shapes the attitudes that people hold about their abilities and that, in turn, has important implications for how class hierarchies perpetuate from one generation to the next.”

 

© 2019 Jim Sliwa, People In Higher Social Class Have An Exaggerated Belief That They Are More Capable Than Others, American Psychology Association (20 May 2019)

 

 

The study referred to (above) is this one:

 

 

Peter Belmi, Margaret A. Neale, David Reiff and Rosemary Ulfe, The social advantage of miscalibrated individuals: The relationship between social class and overconfidence and its implications for class-based inequality, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000187 (2019)

 

 

Certainly true — in my street cop experience

 

For years, I worked in a well-educated and noticeably wealthier than average city. Many of the alleged "low class" people whom I met were noticeably smarter, more societally alert and often wiser and wittier, than the town's "higher class" elite.

 

They were also, on average, markedly less conceited.

 

 

In sum

 

We live in a society in which excessively confident, self-entitled egotists advance despite their comparative lack of ability.

 

It is as if these human leeches have been given the evolutionary ability to anesthetize the rest of us into becoming their willing flock of quiescent sheep.

 

 

The moral? — the American emphasis on confidence is — misplaced and societally self-defeating

 

In truth, the smarter and more competent a person is — the more likely she and he are to recognize their personal and professional limitations. But because we have lost sight of humility's virtue, we have "blessed" ourselves with being ruled by a string of self-entitled manipulators, who manifest no sense of shame.

 

In a supposed democracy, mistakenly accorded deference is suicidal.