There’s one thing that happens in workplaces (but not only there) far more often than we’d like to admit: the people who rise to the surface are often those who seem the most competent, not necessarily those who truly are. They speak confidently, answer immediately, never hesitate. They’re the kind of people who walk into a meeting and naturally take up space, who can say questionable things but say them so well, so directly, that for a few seconds nobody dares challenge them.

It’s not just about company culture, performative capitalism, or that strange contemporary mythology that mistakes assertiveness for leadership. It’s also deeply connected to how our brains work.

From a neuropsychological perspective, the fact that highly self-confident people are often rewarded in professional environments is no coincidence. It partly depends on how the human brain processes social information and makes quick decisions in complex situations.
When we need to evaluate someone in a short amount of time, our brain doesn’t perform a complete, slow, rational analysis. More often, it relies on shortcuts.

In psychology, these are called cognitive heuristics: mental automatisms that allow us to save energy and quickly arrive at a judgment. They are essential, because without cognitive shortcuts we’d be paralyzed by every micro-decision. But they’re also the reason why we so often mistake external signs of competence for competence itself.

A decisive tone of voice, a quick response, dominant body language, and the absence of hesitation: all these elements are interpreted by the brain as signs of reliability. They reduce our sense of uncertainty — and uncertainty is something the brain hates.
A person who communicates in a smooth, linear, apparently doubt-free way requires less cognitive effort from the listener. They are easier to decode and give us the impression of order, direction, and control.
Doubt, on the other hand, is tiring. Complexity forces us to pay attention. Ambivalence forces us to think.

So we often end up rewarding those who simplify things, not necessarily those who understand them better.

This is where the overconfidence bias comes into play: the tendency to overestimate one’s own abilities. Highly self-confident people tend not only to believe they are more prepared than they really are, but also to be perceived by others as more competent and authoritative, regardless of their actual performance. In practice, confidence works like a kind of social amplifier. If someone speaks as though they know, we often believe them before even verifying whether they truly do. Confidence becomes a performance. And performance gets interpreted as authority.

It’s a very subtle dynamic, because it’s not only about “arrogant people” in the most caricatured sense of the word. We’re not necessarily talking about the aggressive boss, the overbearing coworker, or the openly unpleasant person. Sometimes arrogance is far more polished. It’s well dressed, has an impressive vocabulary, and uses words like vision, strategy, impact, positioning. It doesn’t raise its voice, but it leaves no room for others. It doesn’t insult anyone, but it shuts the conversation down. It doesn’t truly listen, because listening would mean admitting that something might change its position.

From a neuropsychological standpoint, however, realistically evaluating one’s own competence is an extremely complex task. It requires sophisticated abilities: metacognition, error monitoring, cognitive flexibility, and the ability to update one’s beliefs based on feedback.
Metacognition, simply put, is the ability to think about one’s own thinking.

It’s a less flashy skill than confidence, but a far more valuable one. Because to truly know how much you know, you also need the tools to measure what you don’t know.

This is where the Dunning-Kruger effect comes in: a phenomenon according to which people with lower competence in a certain field may also have less ability to recognize their own mistakes or limitations. In fact, the same cognitive functions needed to perform a task well are often also necessary to accurately evaluate one’s own performance.

Put simply: if you don’t have enough tools to fully understand something, you may also lack the tools to realize that you’re not understanding it properly.

This is why people with less competence can paradoxically appear more confident. Not because they are braver. Not because they necessarily have a stronger vision. But because they perceive less complexity, less ambiguity, and fewer margins for error.

By contrast, genuinely competent people often tend to show more caution. Not because they are insecure, but because they have a more nuanced perception of complexity.

They know that a problem can have multiple layers. They know that an intuition needs to be tested. They know that a decision may work in one context and fail in another. They know that feedback is not a threat, but a tool.

The problem is that in professional environments this caution is often misinterpreted, creating a very real cognitive and social short circuit: organizations tend to favor those who project immediate confidence, even when that confidence is not supported by depth, real ability, or relational intelligence.

This is exactly where we should begin to change perspective. It’s not about demonizing confidence. Communicating clearly is important, making decisions is necessary, and a leader incapable of taking responsibility can be just as harmful as an arrogant one.

The point is another: we should stop considering doubt as the opposite of competence. In many cases, doubt is actually a form of competence. It’s the sign that someone is seeing multiple layers at once, that they’re not simply reacting to the surface of a problem, that they can distinguish between knowing, intuiting, assuming, and improvising.

Maybe we should train ourselves to better recognize the difference between those who know and those who merely perform knowledge, between those who have vision and those who simply have a very confident voice, between those who are authoritative and those who are authoritarian.

Because the most confident people are not always the ones who know the most. Sometimes they are simply the ones who have fewer tools to notice what they don’t know. And in an increasingly complex world, having very few doubts shouldn’t strike us as a talent — it should make us a little more doubtful.