Some authors have suggested that not just confidence but overconfidence--believing you are better than you are in reality--is advantageous because it serves to increase ambition, morale, resolve, persistence or the credibility of bluffing, generating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which exaggerated confidence actually increases the probability of success. However, overconfidence also leads to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations and hazardous decisions, so it remains a puzzle how such a false belief could evolve or remain stable in a population of competing strategies that include accurate, unbiased beliefs. Here we present an evolutionary model showing that, counterintuitively, overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition.While I know nothing about the making of models, it seems plausible to me. It's been shown, for instance, that optimistic people have better life outcomes than pessimistic; neither optimism nor pessimism are fully grounded in reality, being mostly in the mind of the beholder, yet depressed (pessimistic) people have been shown to be better grounded in reality, and also by definition they have worse outcomes. It pays to be optimistic and therefore, overconfident.
The same lead author along with coauthors wrote another paper on overconfidence in war: Fortune favours the bold: an agent-based model reveals adaptive advantages of overconfidence in war.
Overconfidence has long been considered a cause of war. Like other decision-making biases, overconfidence seems detrimental because it increases the frequency and costs of fighting. However, evolutionary biologists have proposed that overconfidence may also confer adaptive advantages: increasing ambition, resolve, persistence, bluffing opponents, and winning net payoffs from risky opportunities despite occasional failures. We report the results of an agent-based model of inter-state conflict, which allows us to evaluate the performance of different strategies in competition with each other. Counter-intuitively, we find that overconfident states predominate in the population at the expense of unbiased or underconfident states. Overconfident states win because: (1) they are more likely to accumulate resources from frequent attempts at conquest; (2) they are more likely to gang up on weak states, forcing victims to split their defences; and (3) when the decision threshold for attacking requires an overwhelming asymmetry of power, unbiased and underconfident states shirk many conflicts they are actually likely to win. These "adaptive advantages" of overconfidence may, via selection effects, learning, or evolved psychology, have spread and become entrenched among modern states, organizations and decision-makers. This would help to explain the frequent association of overconfidence and war, even if it no longer brings benefits today.Awhile back I suggested that there exists a certain "zone of arrogance", stretching from roughly Eastern Europe and into the Middle East and Central Asia. Since arrogance is a corollary attribute of overconfidence, maybe the suggestion here is that the peoples of the zone of arrogance are those who precisely have evolved the greatest amount of overconfidence, at least compared to the rest of the world.
If that is the case - and this is of course highly speculative, though supported by some evidence - then teasing out the factors that made for the presence of overconfidence and arrogance in a particular region of the world ought to be a worthwhile task. These factors could conceivably be geographical - a la a Jared Diamond type explanation - as well as genetic, climatic, and/or historical. One thing that occurs to me off the top of my head is that the Middle East has been the area of the world longest occupied by civilized societies, hence perhaps there was a greater competition for resources, which led to greater rewards from overconfidence.