Male Over Confidence

Columbia reckons that men tend to overestimate their ability by something like 30%. Women tend to underestimate their ability. And they call it honest over confidence, because it's not that theyre pretending they know more. They actually believe they are about 30 % better than they are. 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. The men will nearly always say they're going to perform better than they actually do - while the women will almost always say they'll perform worse if given the chance.