Confidence is not accuracy

Confidence often comes from fluency, not from being right. An answer feels smooth, familiar, or easy to explain, and that smoothness gets read as a signal of accuracy, even though the two are not the same thing. A person who has repeated a claim many times sounds more certain than a person seeing new, conflicting evidence for the first time, regardless of who is actually correct. This is useful to notice because fluency is cheap: a claim can be well-rehearsed and still wrong, or hesitant and still right. One disconfirming question turns a feeling of certainty into an actual check: what evidence, if I saw it, would change this answer? If nothing comes to mind, the confidence is probably doing more work than the evidence is.