Confidence

Created on July 13, 2026

So I’m back. It’s been a while. Not that anyone would have noticed, I guess. :)

I actually planned to write another blog in November, on the one-year anniversary of my One Punch Man blog, but life happened. And here we are, nine months since my last post.

Time really does fly, doesn’t it?

A Quick Question

Before we begin, I want you to rate yourself from 1 to 10 on these skills

How good are you at math? How good are you at identifying when someone is lying? How good are you at understanding or judging a person’s character?

Keep your answers in mind. We’ll come back to them.

“I Just Know”

Lately, marriage conversations have become pretty common at home. One topic that comes up often is how to judge whether a girl is the right person to marry.

I usually tell my parents that I’m actually pretty bad at judging what kind of person someone is. My mom, on the other hand, believes that after so many years of life experience, she can tell whether someone is good or not. My dad once said that you can learn a lot about a person just by looking into someone’s eyes.

I’ve had similar conversations with my friends as well. Most of them say some version of, “Are samajh mein aa jata hai kaun kaisa hai.” (“You just get a sense of what kind of person someone is.“)

What fascinated me wasn’t whether they were right or wrong. It was the confidence. Almost everyone seemed so sure of their ability to read people, and I started wondering why.

Story #1: My Mom’s “Perfect Read”

One day, one of the students who comes to my mom’s tuition classes rang someone’s doorbell in our building and ran away. A complaint came to my mom, and she told me there were two students we suspected depending on the time at which this happened.

Then she immediately ruled one of them out.

I asked why. She said, “I know him. He can’t do something like this.” Fair enough, I thought. She even tried to get the other kid to confess using a few tricks, but nothing worked.

A few days later, we found out that the student my mom was completely sure was innocent was actually the one who had done it.

I still tease her about that incident. In fact, this was a student she had been teaching for over two years. The funny part is that she still believes she’s very good at judging people. Even something as clear as this wasn’t enough to change her mind. Our brains are surprisingly good at holding on to the beliefs they already have.

Here’s one more story.

Story #2: The Lie Detector

One of my friends (let’s call him X) had the same kind of confidence. He always claimed he could spot lies very easily.

One day we were on a trek, playing Mafia.

In the very first round, X confidently accused another guy (let’s call him Y). He was so sure that I thought he might actually be the detective, so we all voted Y out.

Y turned out to be innocent. X then told me when Y defended himself, he immediately realized Y was innocent. “Uski aankhon mein dekh ke pata chal gaya tha mujhe ki woh achha hai.” (“I could tell by looking into his eyes that he was innocent.“)

Then we voted out X, since I thought he was just playing us being an evil guy. Turns out he was also innocent.

And we lost the game.

It Gets Better

A few months later, X and I were playing another social deduction game called Avalon.

In Avalon, I happened to be on the good team and knew exactly who the bad players were from the start, because of my hidden role as the Merlin. X was also on the good team, but he didn’t know anyone’s identity.

The catch is that if the bad team figures out my role at the end, we lose. So I couldn’t openly reveal who the bad players were.The game started, and almost immediately X became convinced that the two actual bad players were both good. Since I knew the truth, I kept trying to gently push him away from that conclusion. But he was completely convinced by his own reading of people.

At one point, he even made up a story saying he’d seen another player’s role card and that she was evil. That’s how much he trusted his instincts.

Now I had two innocent players accusing each other while the actual bad guys quietly watched. It was a complete nightmare.

Even at the very end, X didn’t want to give up on his theory. I somehow convinced him to vote for the actual bad player, and we pulled it off. For someone who believed he could read people so well, he had played an unbelievably bad game.

I still remind him of that game whenever I get the chance.

So What’s Going On?

Why do so many people overestimate their ability to understand other people? The answer is feedback. Think back to the questions I asked at the beginning.

Math

If I asked you to rate your math skills, you’d probably give a fairly accurate answer. Why? Because math gives you consistent feedback. Every test, every exam, and every solved problem tells you exactly if you are right or wrong.

Lies

Lie detection, on the other hand, has much less accurate feedback, but you still get some. Sometimes you later discover someone lied. Sometimes they confess. Sometimes another person tells you the truth. The feedback loop is weaker, but it exists.

Character

Judging someone’s character is probably the worst of them all.

When you meet someone, they tell you about themselves, their values, and their morals. But those things are usually tested only in rare situations, when the stakes are actually high. They all say they won’t cheat and will win earnestly but when the time comes many justify their cheating in their mind and try to win in any way possible.

On top of that, once you’ve formed an image of someone in your mind, your brain starts looking for evidence that supports it. When they do something that fits your impression, you remember it. When they do something that doesn’t, it’s easy to explain it away as an exception.

The problem is that there’s almost never any clear, objective feedback telling you that your overall judgment of someone’s character was wrong. Without that feedback, your brain starts believing it’s almost always right. Over time, that turns into an almost godlike confidence in your ability to “read people.”

Conclusion

My broader point is simple.

We should be really cautious whenever we’re relying on intuition for our decision making in areas where good feedback is almost impossible to get.

Judging someone’s character is probably one of the strongest examples. At least in my experience, it’s a skill that almost everyone believes they’re better at than they actually are.