Underconfidence
People are not universally overconfident. Several researchers have pointed out situations in which people are underconfident, though these situations tend to be more about practical skill than knowledge.
For example, people believe that they are below average at riding a unicycle and computer programming, and think they have lower-than-average chances of living past 100 years of age (Kruger, 1999; Kruger and Burrus, 2004). Moore and Cain (2007) argue that people believe that they are worse than average at difficult skill-based tasks because they have more information about themselves and thus make judgments for others closer to their beliefs about what is average. When difficulty is increased for both parties in a competitive scenario, for example in a negotiation via added time constraints, both parties believe that they will be hurt more by the added difficulty than their competitors (Moore, 2005), which reflects underconfidence in the ability to deal with adversity, compared to others.With respect to knowledge specifically, Keil et al. (2004) have speculated that the root causes of knowledge overconfidence should also predict instances of knowledge underconfidence when explanations for outcomes are “highly, but not obviously, constrained,” meaning when they are actually less complex than they seem.35.6
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