Peter Schwardmann

Peter Schwardmann

Peter Schwardmann is the first author of "Deception and self-deception" (Nature Human Behaviour, 2019), with Joël van der Weele. In two experiments with 688 participants combined, people who expected to earn money by persuading a partner became significantly more overconfident about their own performance than a control group.

Who they are

This page records the public professional record only. Nothing adverse is recorded and no motive is attributed.

A Carnegie Mellon University faculty page lists him as Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Social and Decision Sciences, with a PhD in Economics from the Toulouse School of Economics and undergraduate studies at the University of Cape Town. It records an earlier post as assistant professor at the University of Munich (LMU), where he was based when the 2019 paper appeared. His research covers why people hold biased beliefs about themselves and the world and how biased beliefs affect outcomes in markets and communication, using laboratory and field experiments.

His curriculum vitae on the Carnegie Mellon site gives a PhD in Economics from the Toulouse School of Economics in 2014, after an MPhil there in 2011, a Master's in Economics at the University of Cape Town in 2008 and a Bachelor of Business Science there in 2007. It dates his Munich post to 2014 to 2021 and his move to Carnegie Mellon to August 2021. Beyond the 2019 paper with van der Weele, it lists a single-author paper on motivated health risk denial and preventative health care investments (Journal of Health Economics, 2019, 65, 78 to 92) and a paper on spin and vague disclosure written with Marvin Deversi and Alessandro Ispano (European Economic Review, 2021). Nothing else about his career was checked for this page.

Key papers

Schwardmann, P., & van der Weele, J. (2019). Deception and self-deception. Nature Human Behaviour, 3(10), 1055-1061. doi:10.1038/s41562-019-0666-7.

The abstract describes two experiments with 688 participants combined. After a difficult task, half of the participants were told they could earn money by convincing a partner in a brief face-to-face exchange that they had performed better. Their private beliefs were significantly more overconfident than the control group's. A noisy feedback signal that raised some participants' confidence made them more persuasive in later interactions.

Key ideas

The paper tests what it calls the strategic self-deception hypothesis, Robert Trivers's proposal that people deceive themselves into higher confidence so that they can better persuade or mislead others. The usual explanation for overconfidence in social science is emotional: it protects self-image or eases anxiety about the future. The experiments set an incentive to persuade against that background and found that confidence moved with the incentive.

A press release from LMU Munich quotes Schwardmann as saying that expecting to impress others is enough to raise self-assessment, and that this helps people persuade. The release adds that the authors did not study wider implications. The paper's authors conclude that overconfidence may be an adaptive cognitive tool with social benefits and not only a flaw.

Sources

  1. Schwardmann, P., & van der Weele, J. (2019). Nature Human Behaviour, 3(10), 1055-1061. Abstract via the RePEc record.
  2. LMU Munich press release on the study (2019), for the design description and the authors' statements.
  3. Carnegie Mellon University, Dietrich College faculty page for Peter Schwardmann.
  4. Schwardmann, P. Curriculum vitae, Carnegie Mellon University, Department of Social and Decision Sciences, for degrees, dates and the publication list.