Making a decision about anything is an emotional process.
Even for a simple, fact-based decision, when you evaluate a possible answer, you give the thumbs up or down based on a feeling.
That feeling is confidence. You’re either highly confident the answer is correct, highly confident it’s not, or lacking confidence either way.
The confidence is supposed to be a direct reflection of knowledge, gained through experience. And usually those two things share a strong correlation, but correlation is not causation.
Confidence can be misplaced. You can feel certain you know something, and then find out you’re wrong.
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Physically, being tired or hungry can greatly affect the accuracy of your confidence. I still cringe when I think of one spectacularly incorrect answer I gave, late in the afternoon after a lousy night’s sleep.
Confidence can be misplaced for emotional reasons too. Admitting a rival is correct requires separating the feeling you have for them from the confidence you have in the answer.
To succeed at programming requires clarity of thought above all else. Both externally, clarity in code; and also internally, emotional clarity.
Unclear code allows bugs to fester. Unclear emotions allow actions to happen unconciously.
So why don’t we all pursue clarity all the time? Because it’s uncomfortable. It requires accepting a situation as it is, not as we’d like it to be.
Like many uncomfortable habits, eating your vegetables or getting exercise, there’s a tremendous reward to clarity.
Pay attention to your emotions to make better decisions.