Episode 6: The Overconfidence Game

of luxury roughing it fantasy vacation home. And it was mostly older people, and clearly people who were wealthy and powerful and thought of themselves as important. And we were both about forty and were clearly like the young ingeneus in the room. Rebecca had gone to Colorado to visit her friend Sally. Sally had talked her into going to this party, and the point of the party was to make Rebecca feel ignored, at least that's how she felt.

The host hardly said a word to her until they were about to leave, and then came over to us and said to me, so, I hear you've written a couple of books, And at that point, how many books had you written? I think seven, which is not technically a couple. And so I said several actually, and he said, oh, and what are they about in this already intensely patronizing town.

My most recent one had been about Edward Moybridge at Moybridge's transformation of photography into a technology that could capture motion. And he interrupted me to tell me that I should know about the very important Moybridge book that had just come out, and he was about to explain to you about Wood Moybridge. He did proceed to explain about the

very important Moybridge book I should know about. The host went on and on and on about this book about the British photographer that both women could tell he hadn't actually read. They could tell this because Rebecca had written the book River of Shadows, Edward Moybridge and the Technological wild West. It took my friend Sally three or four times of trying to interject that's her book before he actually listened to her enough to shut the fuck up.

And so it's kind of glorious and horrific as a pristine shining diamond example, a pristine shining diamond like example. But of what the answer didn't leap instantly to Rebecca's mind, she filed the rich guy away as an example of something. It took her five years to find the words to fully express what it had been an example of. But then one morning she sat down and wrote a piece Men Explain Things to Me, she called it. It was

an instant classic. I wrote the essay in two thousand and eight, and some mysterious, unnamed person who had always assumed as a woman coined the term man explaining in response to it. And then the world was off and running when you published the original essay. Did you get any kind of backlash? Was there any hostility? I got a very funny letter from a man who said he'd never patronized a woman in his life, and I just needed to get over my feelings of inferiority and speak up.

And he proceeded to patronize. Why. Yes, well, welcome to my gender. Michael, you sound surprised. What Rebecca got next was an avalanche of similar stories, all from women. There is the woman who listened to a man explain how to pronounce her own name. There was the female scientist to whom a man explained the contents of her own academic paper. There was a one about well, I shouldn't really be the one telling you about this. Can you

walk me through a few of them? Somebody tweets a photograph of a woman sharpshooter in last Summer's Olympics, and a man explains that she's got the wrong stance, and he's explaining she should hold it with both hands. He's wrong, of course, men explaining sports to professional female athletes turned out to be a whole subgenre of man's plaining. Molly Sidell, who won a silver or bronze medal in track in the Olympics a few years ago, tweeted, on my flight, I was talking to a guy next to me and

it came up that I run. He starts telling me how I need to train high mileage and pulls up an analysis he'd made a a pro runner's training on his phone. The pro runner was me, it was my training. Didn't have the heart to tell him, just as Rebecca hadn't had the heart to tell the rich guy that he was lecturing her about a book she herself had written. She's obviously found the heart since can I just read

you one? I have an almost bottomless appetite. Here's a woman named Eileen Mary O'Connell, who said on Twitter a few years ago, thinking about the time that I said I was distantly related to Marie Curie, and a man explained, it's pronounced Mariah Carey. I'm Michael Lewis, pronounced Michael Lewis. And this is against the rules where we explore on fairness in American life by looking at what's happened to

various characters in American life. This season is about experts, and this episode is about men, or any way about this thing that men do because they really are naturally superior to women at one thing, offering themselves up as experts when they clearly are not. Now, I am, of course a man, and as a man, I might offer you with total confidence all kinds of theories about why

we are the way we are. I could explain until every oxygen molecule is sucked out of the room why men are so ready to explain things to people who know more about those things than we do. But let me turn instead to the journalists Claire Shipment and Katty k because they wrote an entire book that offers up one really plausible theory, and I actually read it. It's called The confidence code. Columbia University has come up with

a phrase, which we love, is called honest overconfidence. That's Caddy Kay and Columbia reckons that men tend to overestimate their ability by something like thirty percent. Women tend to underestimate their ability, but men tend to overestimate their ability. And they call it honest over confidence because it's not that they're pretending they know more. They actually believe they

are about thirty percent better than they are. Now we've all learned to be skeptical about this sort of social science. Some researcher discovers something shocking about human nature and then it turns out to be not really true, or only sort of true, or true only in certain circumstances. But in the case of male over confidence, the findings are

totally solid. If you want to do a social science test with a bunch of graduate students and you want to make sure you know in advance what the answer is going to be, you give a group of men and women a scientific reasoning quiz, and the men will nearly always say they're going to perform better than they actually do, and the women will nearly always say they're going to perform worse than they actually do. And why is this? I know it's a hard question to answer,

but when does this first manifest itself in life? Do little girls and little boys exhibit this tendency or does it only happen later in life. This really starts to manifest itself in middle school, around puberty. We commissioned a survey for our book on Confidence and Girls that suggests that between the ages of nine and about thirteen, girls lose a third of their confidence and they never get

it back. Obviously, boys can grow up to be under confident men, and girls can grow up to be confident women. And obviously not every man longs to explain things that he shouldn't. But there's an undeniable pattern here men thinking they have an expertise that they don't. You really don't have to look any further than Wall Street for examples. Imagine that you are an individual investor, maybe not that active, but occasionally trading. That's Terry o'deane, a finance professor at

UC Berkeley. He and his colleague Brad Barber made what might be the purest case study of mail over confidence. But they set out to just look at how ordinary people traded in the stock market. You open up the Wall Street Journal one morning, you read a paragraph about some company. You say, Wow, that really sounds great. I think I'll buy it. So you don't pause and say, maybe professional investors already know this, It's already been incorporated

into price. You just say, sounds like a good idea, I'll buy. Maybe another investor reads the same stuff, says intriguing company. But I really don't know enough to place a trade, and I gotta get to work. So what's the difference between over confidence and confidence? I can see how confidence is sort of what leads thought to action. Yes,

but what's the difference just confidence? Why is it over confident systematically on the side of thinking you know more than you do and that's what leads you to buy the stock or sell the stock. Yes, I think it takes a great deal of hubris to think you are going to do part time if you have a regular job, you are going to do what professional money managers struggle to do, and many never succeed at. Unless you're trading

on inside information, which is illegal. When you make a bet on the price of some stock, you're basically betting on the flip of a coin, and you're paying a commission each time you do it over and over. The smartest professional investors fail to outperform the market by picking stocks. For an amateur to even try, well, it's a lot

like man explaining, Terry Odeane thought so too. He wondered whether there was any difference between how men and women behaved in the market, So he and his colleague got a hold of data from online brokerage accounts. They sorted the money into three buckets, money managed by single men, money managed by single women, and money managed by married couples. Men did worse than women, and not just a little worse.

Both men and women underperformed to buy and hold approach, but men underperformed by one percentage point more a year on average than women. Single men by one point four percentage points more a year on average than single women, which is actually quite significant. Yes, it sounds like a little but if you compound that over a lifetime. Even occasionally, financial reporters will say, well does anyone really care about

one percent? And what I usually say is, next time you're shopping for a mortgage, ask yourself that question, right, I mean, a one percentage point difference in your mortgage is going to add up to tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars over the life of a thirty year mortgage. Hearing this, you might conclude that it would all be better off if Wall Street were overhauled and women were put in charge of the financial risk taking.

But what we got instead was a world historic financial crisis engineered by very confident men. Even that didn't cause anyone to ask if leaving the financial risk taking to men was a great idea, except in Iceland. In Iceland, they actually figured it out. They replaced the men in the banks with women, and the male prime minister with a woman who promised never again to let icelandic men touch her banks. Outside of Iceland, men still mostly decide

what to do with big piles of money. Terry o'deane's findings have gone ignored. But has anybody ever called you say thank you, Terry. I have my job managing the stock portfolio because of your paper. That has never happened. One thing did happen. I got a letter once. Shortly after paper got, you know, some coverage in the popular press. A woman wrote said, I want to thank you. She's in her sixties, and she said, my husband has been actively trading our savings and I've been very nervous about

it for the last few years. And then I read about your paper and I told him to stop actively trading my savings. So I thought, well, that feels good against the rules, will be right back. Let's recap our findings thus far. Men are especially capable of thinking they know things they really don't. They feel a weird compulsion to explain subjects to people who know more about those subjects than they, and they are more likely than people who are not men to think they know things that

are totally unknowable. Sometimes they even act on that belief and lose huge piles of money. But it's not really men's fault, or rather, it's not the fault of any individual man. If a man is deluded into believing he knows more than he actually does, it's because he's surrounded by people who share his delusion, who encourage his over confidence. The writer Maria Kanakova wrote a whole book about this,

The Confidence Game. It was called It was all about con artists, but it is also about what con artists tell us about our culture. Exhibit A was a man named Ferdinand Waldo Damara, who had a gift for persuading people that he knew stuff that he did not were during the Korean War, and he decides that he's going to steal the credentials of a doctor in Canada and apply to be a doctor on a ship, a military doctor, because he actually identifies a perfect opportunity. Why would he

even want to do that? Like, why would why would you want to be a doctor on a ship? So Damara is someone who is so narcissistic, so full of himself that he thinks that he is the best person in the world, and he loves more than anything else, playing god. And what is the ultimate profession where you really get to play god. It's being a surgeon. It's

actually having people's lives in your hands. So he falsified his credentials, ended up getting an appointment, and ended up being the sole physician aboard this ship heading to Korea during the war. Not only that, but he then ended up operating on a ship full of soldiers who had been in an ambush. So he ended up operating on all of them and, as he said, saving their lives. But we don't actually know what happened you might see this imposters an extreme example, but you might also see

them as a case in point. But this feels like a very male thing. I have a very hard time

imagining a woman doing it. I agree, I agree, And I think that those types of coins that's why we don't really see we don't know any stories of women pulling something like that off all of the female cons that I was able to kind of unearth when I was when I was researching the Confidence Game, where things like, oh, I'm going to pretend to be the daughter of Carnegie so that I can get people to loan me lots of money because they think that I'm going to come

into my inheritance or something like that. But it's not a pretensive expertise. It's it's something very different. It's I'm not who I say I am, but it's not and I can do what I can't actually do. I am heir to this fortune, I'm a socialite and I have connections to royalty. I am part of the aristocracy. Why

is it you think women don't pretend to expertise. I think that actually just because of the type of society we're in, the fact that we are in a male dominated world that female experts tend to be questioned more. If a woman says I'm the best surgeon you've ever seen, red flags are going to start waving. Con Artists pick up on psychological cues. That's how they can us. The cue here is that when we hear the word expert, we form a picture in our head. And that picture

is of a man. My husband and I were on a pretty long flight. Her name is Aminemogul, doctor Aminemogul, and I was sitting it was like a triple seven jet, So I was sitting close to the aisle and in the middle section, and there was a gentleman who was walking back from the restrooms who was seated just one row behind me, to my left, and he just completely collapsed.

I mean he just fell down, face forward, and a flight attendant immediately rushed over, and so she shouted to find out if there was anyone who was a doctor on the plane. Amina wasn't just any doctor. She was a former army doctor who now worked as a general practitioner. She'd been trained for battlefield emergencies. She was exactly the kind of doctor you'd won in this moment, and she was right there she'd seen it all. So I stood up and I said, I'm a doctor. And right behind

this gentleman's row was a older male nurse. He identified himself as a nurse. He was a Caucasian. I'm South Asian, and he stepped up and the flight attendant kind of completely ignored me. And my husband was seated next to me. He's a pretty tall Caucasian guy, and he tried to alert the flight attendant and said, hey, my wife is here. She's a doctor. And she looked at me, and then she looked at him and she said, we have the help that we need. And and that was that. Do

you think she looked at you and thought not doctor autely? Absolutely? And actually, you know what, now that I think about it, I think she actually said, what you're a doctor, like like it was somehow unbelievable. And my husband goes, yeah, she's a doctor, and then she just looked at him and said, oh okay, and then just kind of carried on. And I looked at my husband and I looked at

each other and we were just like, well, that was bizarre. Meanwhile, they were this man who might be dying on the floor of the cot and I'm thinking to myself, Wow, I hope he's okay. Unfortunately, it never occurred to the male nurse or anyone else that they were in the presence of someone who might know more than they did.

But the truth was that Ameda didn't give the episode much thought until she stumbled upon a Facebook group of female doctors in which another woman described how she'd just come off a flight with some medical emergency and she shouted that she was a doctor, and everyone had just ignored her, and a lot of people just started chiming in with their anecdotes, and there were a lot of them. There were a lot of them. I was kind of shocked at how many other people had been through the

same thing. That's how doctor Amina Mogul found out that this was actually a thing. Invisible female doctors on planes. Not even a man wants to die on an airplane because no one can see the female doctor in seat eighteen B. It's clearly not healthy for any society to treat men as if they know more than they actually do and women as if they know less. It encourages men to become imposters. It drags women with actual knowledge

into imposter syndrome. It cheats the entire society of expertise, and so the obvious question is why does this happen? Before you or I answer that question, let's describe, or let's let Caddy K describe. One final science experiment done a few years ago by an American psychologist named Zach Estes. He sat a group of men and women and gave

them a spatial awareness test. It's a series of like Rubik's cube type puzzles on a computer screen, and you have to solve these puzzles, and he gives them the same test, and the women do significantly less well than the men do. So Professor Estes goes back over the results and he sees that what's happened is that the women have skipped questions more often than the men have.

And he thought that was interesting. The women were basically saying they didn't know the answer to a question a lot more than the men, and it wasn't because the men were more likely to know the answers. The next test, he gives the same group another set and he says, okay, now no one is allowed to skip anything. No omissions is what he calls it. So no one's allowed to skip anything, and guess what. On the test where the women have to answer the questions, they do just as

well as the men. Sometimes it is better to think you know the answer to the question when you don't, because it leads you to answer the question rather than just leave it blank. That's the joy of overconfidence. It pays, and not just in a social science lab. In real life. Obviously, no one knows your cards except for you, and all they see is how you present yourself, right. The only

information that's available is how you play. After Maria Kannakova wrote her a book about con artists, she stumbled upon a book called The Theory of Games by a pair of genius mathematicians named von Neumann and Morgenstern. Morgenstern had gone looking for games that resembled real life. He had this idea that if he could figure out the smartest way to play certain games, he could also figure out the smartest way to deal with a lot of situations

in real life. He has this whole passage where he says that chess is boring, like chess is a bullshit game. Don't have me play chess because I can solve it. Right, I'm creating this thing that's going to become the computer. Give me enough computing power and I tell you the right move. That's not life. That doesn't help me make decisions in life. How do I decide in a nuclear war situation? He actually, you know, at that time he was advising the National Security Council, so this was not abstract.

He said, you know, in roulette also total bullshit, because that's just gambling, that's chance. So that's almost the you've got the end of the spectrum. You can chess on one of which is entirely rule based, and you can solve with AI and coin flipping or roulette or total chance, and somewhere in between is poker, and that's life too. Exactly. Poker is the model for its decision making in life, because both poker and life are games of incomplete information,

he said. In real life this is a quote from him, which is one of my favorite quotes. He said, real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics, of deception, of trying to figure out what does this man think I mean to do. Maria had never played poker and had no clue how to act, but she set out to become a professional poker player. The first thing she did was hire a coach, a famous player, and you had no idea of even the rules of the game. And I told him that I didn't know much about poker.

I mean, I know that there are fifty four cards in a duck and he just he said, wait, excuse me. I just his face just changed and I said what And he said how many cards are in a duck? And now I start doubting myself a little. I said fifty four and he's like, well, you know, theoretically with the jokers, yes, but when we're doing odds calculations, it would be better if you used fifty two, you know, just to keep things a little simple. Is help me

list the ways pokers like life. One is that you're never going to have or like life's dis making decisions in life one is you you have incomplete information. You're never gonna have perfect information. You know, you're never gonna have perfect information, but you're getting more information, so you have to update and respond to new information, which is his own kind of skill. Right. And there are probabilities that can be calculated, but they're only partially knowable, right,

Am I wrong about that? Correct? This is all correct? Anything can you think of anything else that goes on. So then you have, I mean, the incomplete information works in a way where no one knows what cards you have, and the only thing they can see is how you act right. And that's true of all the other people too. But when she started out, Maria really didn't know how to act at a poker table. I was in a totally foreign environment. I was suffering from major impostor syndrome.

Professional pokers about ninety seven to ninety eight percent mail. So this is something where you know you are often the only woman at the table, And so I was letting things like, oh, I don't want them to think I'm a bitch guide my decisions, or oh, well, you know you're raising so much here, you can just take the pot. It's fine, I don't need to win every single one. Here you go. This isn't the story of Maria's career as a poker player. You can read that

in the book. She eventually wrote the biggest bluff. She'd wind up winning hundreds of thousands of dollars. Five cots and Lonnie can hit to eliminate Maria Knakova. He's pretty good at hitting this. Nope, he misses on this occasion and Maria Knakova survives. For my own purposes here, I'm interested in a single little lesson she learned about over confidence.

So I had this conversation with my coach and he told me something that, taken with my work on over confidence, I think, really got to kind of the heart of the issue of confidence versus over confidence at the poker table. So what he told me was that people who start out playing poker tend to fall into one of two camps. Either they are way too cautious, That's what I was doing. You know, they're scared and they play scared. Or they

are way too aggressive. They bluff way too much. Bluffing is to poker what man splitting is, the conversation a pretense that you know more or have more than you really do. It didn't come naturally to Maria. She didn't bluff. She was suckered by men who did. So were the other men, because when you haven't seen the other person play well, you judge them by how they seem. When nobody knows who you are, people tend to, at least at the beginning, give you the benefit of the doubt.

So if you sit down at a new table and you are incredibly aggressive. The first time you're incredibly aggressive, people are probably going to assume you have a good hand and they're going to fold. The second time, they'll probably assume you have a good hand and they'll fold. So he said, if you're going to pick one extreme, you want to pick the aggressive extreme because aggressive players, you know, they tend to win more often, because aggression

often pays off. So the first wave of washouts are the cautious people. Yes, so I would have lost my money long before the overconfident people. But also, when you're aggressive, you put people in more difficult situations. So if you're passive, you're easy to play against because other people can. Then you know, they know that when you're betting, you're strong. They know that when you're not betting, you're weak, and

you become predictable. In professional poker, this eventually works itself out. You play thousands and thousands of hands with the same person and you see their cards after they've bluffed, and you learn not to take what they do at face value. But in real life, we don't usually get to play thousands of hands of the same game with the same people. In real life, we go to a dinner party with people we've never met. Real life is more like amateur poker.

When you're aggressive, it becomes much more difficult, especially if you're smart. Aggressive that tends to win more money in the short term because confidence, actually, you know, is something at the poker table where confidence is part of the information that other people have. Maria had set out to see what poker could teach her about real life. One big thing it taught her was the power of overconfidence

in all kinds of human interactions. Imagine two people coming into an interview right and being asked the exact same question, and someone asks me, okay, you know, do you know how to do this? And I say, well, you know, I haven't worked on it in the last five years, but I can ramp up really quickly and I have all these components skills. Other person comes in and says, yes, absolutely, I could do it, no problem. Who's going to get hired right to me? Who was who actually might know more?

Or the person who's like, yeah, totally, I know, I know exactly what this is. That approach works. People who are just overconfident oftentimes just get their way right right. When you were learning, did you feel like, when you were getting better, did you have a sense of yourself masculinizing yourself. Yeah, that's a funny way of putting it,

but yeah I did. I had a conversation with my husband at some point where I said I need to grow bigger balls and he just looked at me like I was totally insane, and I was like, you know, I've just realized that I just I lack them completely and that's not good. He's like, yes, you do lack, and I'm okay with that. Here's the most unsettling thing about man splaining, and also the most unsettling thing about

over confidence. Now that it's got a name, it just seems pathetic when some old rich guy tries to tell a famous female writer about her own book. We laugh, but we missed the point. The point is that most of the time he will leave that party feeling even more confident than he did before. Against the Rules is written and hosted by me Michael Lewis and produced by Katherine Girardeau and Lydia Jean Cott. Julia Barton is our editor, with additional editing by Audrey Dilling. Beth Johnson is our

fact checker and mil o'bell executive produces. Our music is created by John Evans and Matthias Bossi, a Stellwagen stympanette. We record our show at Berkeley Advanced Media Studios, expertly helmed by Tofa Ruth. Thanks also to Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fame, John Snars, Carl mcgilori, Christina Sullivan, Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Ratner, Nicole Morano, Royston Preserve, Daniella Lakhan, Mary Beth Smith, and Jason Gambrel. Against the Rules is a production of

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follow at Pushkin Pods. Define more Pushkin Podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I was thinking of my Rebetta Stulnes right, which I totally forgot hold on, hold on tofa Are you recording this? I was at a party and I was talking to a guy who worked in tech, and he was explaining to me how the business of podcasting works, and the

thing about it is. I was genuinely listening to him, thinking that maybe he could tell me something I didn't know for some reason, like just silently letting him talk for like so long that eventually another guy who had been overhearing the conversation interrupted and said, are you seriously explaining to a professional podcast or the business of podcasting? And what did the guy do? Then he got embarrassed and he stopped talking. Yes, but think how many times

that happens and nobody ever says anything. Yeah, well I didn't say anything.