Editor's Letter: Running amok with confidence

last updated 8 January 2015

Overconfidence kills. That’s the takeaway from last week’s upset in a special election in upstate New York that was widely seen as a referendum on Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare reforms (see Talking points). In New York’s historically Republican 26th Congressional District, Democrat Kathy Hochul won handily by running almost solely on her opposition to Ryan’s plan. The conventional wisdom: Republicans overreached, handing gleeful Democrats a weapon to use in 2012 to repay the shellacking they received at the polls last November. But how did this turnabout happen, only a year after the Democrats were punished by voters for overreaching on their own health plan? Why did both parties, fresh from election victories, grow overconfident to the point of misjudging the mood of the electorate? Is it a vicissitude of our ping-pong political system or something deep in the human psyche?

Blame it on the epidemic of narcissism, said psychologist W. Keith Campbell, head of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program at the University of Georgia. You can see narcissism’s toxic effect in the intransigence of our leaders and the hardened attitudes of the rank and file. Recent studies bear him out. Ninety-four percent of professors think they are above-average teachers, and a majority of high school students believe they are smarter than their test scores indicate. As anyone who has tried to accomplish something large and difficult knows, confidence is a boon companion when things go awry. In the long run, though, “overconfidence backfires,” said Campbell. Perhaps it is too much to ask that politicians, whose outsize egos have propelled them toward the levers of power, actually hear the will of the people. Until then, that’s what elections are for.