This week our guest is your favorite psychological scientist, Dr. Maryanne Garry of the University of Waikato in New Zealand and garrylab.com

Dr. Garry and four of her colleagues published a paper recently in the Royal Society Open Science called "Trivially informative semantic context inflates people's confidence they can perform a highly complex skill".

The experiments built on previous studies which demonstrated that people have highly inflated beliefs of their capabilities doing highly complex tasks for which they are entirely unqualified. In particular, a high percentage of people have high confidence that they could land a commercial plane with no help from the tower. In this study, they tested whether watching a short, trivially informative video of two pilots landing a plane would influence that confidence level.

As always with Dr. Garry, you'll learn a lot, you'll laugh along with us, and your dreams will be crushed as only she can.

If you want to listen to more interviews with Dr. Garry, check out these episodes of Chit Chat Across the Pond Lite:

* CCATP #727 – Dr. Maryanne Garry on How Everything You Remember is Wrong

* CCATP #629 - Dr. Garry on Study of Language Skills vs Numeracy In Learning to Program

* CCATP #576 - Dr. Maryanne Garry on Grammar Pet Peeves

* CCATP #554 - Dr. Maryanne Garry on Persuasion with Facts and Data

* CCATP #510 - Dr. Maryanne Garry on Many Memory Questions

* CCATP #452 Dr. Garry Asks "Compared to What?"

* CCATP #441 Dr. Maryanne Garry on Cognitive Biases, Learning and Aging