Is there a name for a cognitive bias that causes people who have been successful in one area to be overconfident in their level of knowledge / ability in another unrelated area?
It's related to the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'm specifically referring to the case where the overconfidence comes as a result of having been successful, and feeling as if that success makes the person qualified to have strong opinions on all matters, even when at odds with experts in that field.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is specific to expertise in a particular domain. The domains tested in the original studies by Kruger & Dunning (1999) are: humor, logical reasoning, and English grammar.
It is fully possible to underestimate your skills in one domain in which you are an expert, and overestimate your skill in another in which you are a novice. As per an interview with Dunning, published at Vox.com:
But there are a couple things that people get wrong that are major.
The first is they think it’s about them [i.e., others]. That is, there are those people out there who are stupid and don’t realize they are stupid.
Now, those people may exist, and the work isn’t about that. It’s about the fact that this is a phenomenon that visits all of us sooner or later. Some of us are a little more flamboyant about it. Some of us aren’t. But not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition. The problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don’t see it in ourselves.
The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that.
Your description also seems related to a logical fallacy, namely appeal to unqualified authority, or appeal to false authority, typically categorized simply under appeal to authority:
However, appealing to authority as a reason to believe something is fallacious whenever the authority appealed to is not really an authority in this particular subject, when the authority cannot be trusted to tell the truth, when authorities disagree on this subject (except for the occasional lone wolf), when the reasoner misquotes the authority, and so forth.
Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of personality and social psychology, 77(6), 1121.
Duffx,
The cognitive bias that you are looking for is called the Overconfidence Bias. Your description exactly matches its symptoms. With this bias, an expert is more likely to be the victim of overconfidence. This overconfidence, however, is not within the expert's field but within a totally unrelated field in which both the expert and an average layperson have a similar lack of experience. (So, technically, both the expert and a layperson are both laypeople in this field.) For particular reasons, the expert believes that the prowess in their own field will translate over to or aid them with an unrelated field.
A special feature of the Overconfidence Bias is that the expert's overestimation of his abilities increases as the difficulty of the task increases. ie. The more difficult/complex the task is, the more confident the expert is that he can complete the task. Reversely, when the task gets easier, the expert still believes that he can accomplish the task better than an average layperson but his advantage is not as great.
Below is a passage from the Wikipedia page about the Overconfidence Bias which restates the above. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overconfidence_effect
The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in his or her judgements is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgements, especially when [their] confidence is relatively high. "The Role of Individual Differences in the Accuracy of Confidence Judgments" The Journal of General Psychology. 129 (3): 257–299
"The key finding is that confidence exceeds accuracy so long as the subject is answering hard questions about an unfamiliar topic."
"This phenomenon is most likely to occur on hard tasks, hard items, when failure is likely or when the individual making the estimate is not especially skilled."
The above scenario may initially appear to be the Dunning-Kruger Effect because the expert is indeed a novice in an unrelated field and is overestimating his abilities like in the Dunning-Kruger Effect. However, with the Overconfidence Bias, the expert overestimates his abilities more than the average layperson does. Further, the harder the task, the larger the overestimation by the expert. This particular increase in overestimation will not occur in a normal layperson. As you can see, the Overconfidence Bias differs slightly but significantly from the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Technically maybe not a "cognitive bias," but... "ultracrepidarianism"?
Wikipedia: "Ultracrepidarianism is the tendency for people to confidently make authoritative pronouncements in matters above or outside one's level of knowledge. Often, those pronouncements fall entirely outside the ultracrepidarian's realm of legitimate expertise."
"Another expression of ultracrepidarianism, as instantiated by those with an actual expertise in something, is the tendency to start treating all other fields as somehow being sub-categories to your own field."
