Chit Chat Across The Pond Lite

This week our guest is your favorite psychological scientist, Dr. Maryanne Garry of the University of Waikato in New Zealand and garrylab.com Dr. Garry and four of her colleagues published a paper recently in the Royal Society Open Science called "Trivially informative semantic context inflates people's confidence they can perform a highly complex skill". The experiments built on previous studies which demonstrated that people have highly inflated beliefs of their capabilities doing highly complex tasks for which they are entirely unqualified. In particular, a high percentage of people have high confidence that they could land a commercial plane with no help from the tower. In this study, they tested whether watching a short, trivially informative video of two pilots landing a plane would influence that confidence level. As always with Dr. Garry, you'll learn a lot, you'll laugh along with us, and your dreams will be crushed as only she can. If you want to listen to more interviews with Dr. Garry, check