Overconfidence and Prejudice
Paul Heidhues, Botond K\H{o}szegi, Philipp Strack

TL;DR
This paper models how overconfidence influences social beliefs and prejudices, explaining phenomena like in-group bias and discrimination perceptions through a novel theoretical framework.
Contribution
It introduces a model where overconfidence leads to specific social biases and predictions about discrimination, hierarchy, and group evaluations.
Findings
Overconfidence increases belief in discrimination against one's own group.
Shared group memberships lead to more positive evaluations of individuals.
Biases are affected by societal group divisions and information accuracy.
Abstract
We explore conclusions a person draws from observing society when he allows for the possibility that individuals' outcomes are affected by group-level discrimination. Injecting a single non-classical assumption, that the agent is overconfident about himself, we explain key observed patterns in social beliefs, and make a number of additional predictions. First, the agent believes in discrimination against any group he is in more than an outsider does, capturing widely observed self-centered views of discrimination. Second, the more group memberships the agent shares with an individual, the more positively he evaluates the individual. This explains one of the most basic facts about social judgments, in-group bias, as well as "legitimizing myths" that justify an arbitrary social hierarchy through the perceived superiority of the privileged group. Third, biases are sensitive to how the…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
