The Illusion of Stock Picking Skill

Our knowledge of the general rule that we could not predict had no effect on our confidence in individual cases. Confidence is a feeling which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it. It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true. Just as nisbit and borgida showed, people are often reluctant to infer the particular from the general.