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In the fourth season of Parks and Recreation, Paul Rudd plays a wealthy businessman named Bobby Newport, a city council candidate, as he looks for something "easy" to do. He is asked during a debate how he would have repaired the city. His answer: "I have no idea." Still, the audience is amazed by the frustration of rival Leslie Knope.
It's funny because it's relatable. Sooner or later we could all meet a Bobby Newport. What is there in an elite education that seems to give people the feeling of being skilled for tasks where they have little experience? This is one of the questions that inspired a study published Monday in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
The researchers suggest that part of the answer involves what they call "excessive trust." In several experiments, they discovered that people from a higher social class were more likely to have an exaggerated sense of their average skills. They found that this undeserved overconfidence was interpreted by outsiders as a skill.
The findings point to another way in which family wealth and parental education – two of the many factors used to assess social class in the study – affect a person's experience when moves in the world.
"With this research, we now have reason to think that coming from a higher social class confers another benefit," said Jessica A. Kennedy, professor of management at Vanderbilt University, who did not participate in the study.
Studying social class is delicate. First is the question of definitions. "Most people would say that they are middle-class," he said. Peter Belmi, professor at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and lead author of the study. But how can this be?
Even social class researchers find it difficult to agree on the weight to be given to income, family wealth, professional prestige and other factors.
Earlier work had shown that many people could correctly measure the income level of a stranger's family and the mother's education level in less than 60 seconds. But what they answer exactly is not well understood, said Rebecca Carey, who studies social class and identity at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.
The study consisted of four experiments. The class was defined in several ways each time.
The first experiment involved about 150,000 small business owners in Mexico who applied for a loan. In addition to providing their income and level of education, they were asked to choose a step on a scale, representing their place relative to others in Mexico.
As part of the loan process, they passed a memory test. (The actual task was designed to try to predict if a person would default on a loan.) For the purposes of the study, participants were also asked to estimate their degree of satisfaction with others. Researchers found that upper-class people generally did better than others, but not as much as they expected.
The disparity between the estimated performance and actual performance of the higher class was more dramatic in a subsequent study of 230 students at the University of Virginia.
This time, social class was measured by the assessment of how students perceive themselves relative to others in the United States, their parents' income, and the education of their parents. The researchers found that upper-class students were not able to outperform their peers in a trivia exercise. But again, most of them were certain.
To try to understand the consequences of overconfidence, the researchers constructed a simulated job interview. The same questions were asked to students and videotaped. A group of strangers then watched the videos and rated the candidates. The selection committee has generally opted for the same people who overestimated their abilities. Overconfidence has been misinterpreted as a skill.
Ms. Carey was not convinced by the benefits of the experience of a false talk about real life. She was also concerned about the findings of the first of four experiences, which she said was based too much on the feeling of social class on the part of the participants.
"But what they show very regularly is that social class is linked to excessive trust," she said. Other studies have also shown that people who show too much trust are perceived as more competent. Ms. Carey suggested that it could be that "in a lower class setting, the cost is higher if you make a mistake when you make a mistake."
And not all class groups appreciate that "simulate until you succeed," said Dr. Belmi. "I grew up in the Philippines with the idea that if you have nothing to say, shut up and listen."
The researchers said they hoped the take-away would not be too confident. Wars, stock market crashes and many other crises can be blamed on excessive trust, they said. So how do managers, employers, voters and clients avoid overvaluing social class and being fooled by incompetent rich people? Dr. Kennedy stated that she was encouraged to find that if you showed people real facts about a person, the high status associated with overconfidence often disappears.
"We might also need to punish more than us overconfident behavior," she said.
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