“Overconfidence and the Frailty of Knowledge”

By Dr. Marilin Colon, Lecturer in Psychology, Cal State East Bay and Tucker Hiatt, Visiting Scholar in Chemistry, Stanford.

While self-confidence is a prized human attribute, too much confidence can be obnoxious, pernicious, and even deadly. This audience-participation skeptalk will present a simple 10-question quiz to measure an important aspect of individual self-confidence. With analysis and discussion of these measurements, audience members will be better able to calibrate properly their personal levels of self-confidence. The ultimate goal will be a “healthier skepticism” toward one’s own depth of knowledge about the world. (This skeptalk is co-presented with Wonderfest, the Bay Area Beacon of Science http://wonderfest.org.)