Worse-than-average effect

Biological Parallel

When foraging tasks are highly complex—extracting insects from bark crevices or cracking hard-shelled nuts—naive birds systematically underestimate their ability to learn them and abandon profitable strategies prematurely. This is the mirror image of Dunning-Kruger: on difficult tasks, limited experience prevents accurate calibration, but the direction of error flips to underconfidence. Evolution builds asymmetric error tolerance: overconfidence on easy tasks where failure is cheap, underconfidence on hard tasks where persistent failure burns critical energy reserves.