Oh, I can do this: Getting overconfident by watching videos on YouTube
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mental-mishaps/201804/the-youtube-overconfidence-effect
We human beings as social learners are always observing others. In class we discussed how these observations lead to copying others’ behaviors, and therefore affect the choices we make. But does simply watching videos of people doing certain things also have effects on our thoughts and beliefs? The answer is yes. In the article “The YouTube Overconfidence Effect”, Dr. Ira Hyman states that people tend to underestimate the difficulty of mastering certain skills after they watched videos featuring experts giving smooth performances.
In the researches mentioned in this article, participants were asked to watch several videos on dart throwing, “moonwalking” (the Michael Jackson step), or juggling bowling pins. Although most participants predicted that they would be able to perform these quite well after watching the relevant videos, (as these moves didn’t seem to be causing the people in the videos lots of trouble, and they believed that they had paid close attention to the “crucial details”) most participants actually performed poorly when they were asked to really throw tarts or demonstrated the “moonwalking”. This suggested that viewers got overconfident after watching others accomplishing certain things relatively easily in videos. After gaining hand-on experiences, the participants soon realized that they had overestimated their abilities, and thus gave reasonable responses when they were asked to rate their own performances afterwards.
In the lectures and problem sets, we mainly explored the effects observing others had on our perception and expectations of the outside world. This article provides an interesting insight into how our observations on others influences our self-expectations. It is also another great example showing that what we learned in classrooms are closely related to our daily life.