Arrogance which bothers me in my children and of which I am ashamed when I display it is a strident confidence in one's judgement about some matter that's out of proportion to one's actual knowledge and experience. (It's quite distinct from charming childish optimism that one can take on any challenge.)
I believe you can become arrogant by getting used to being the smartest person in the room (or believing you are), noticing the times you readily had insights that others lack, etc.. Confirmation bias plays in, too, since as soon as you start to conceive of yourself as knowing, unless you try very hard not to, you'll take more note of events that confirm your self-assessment than that disconfirm it.
As others have noted, arrogance as described here is closely akin to the vice of pride (which is opposed to the virtue of humility). The main distinction I would draw is that arrogance to me has a stronger social aspect--a particular way of presenting oneself, born from pride. Pride itself is a spiritual state and could (at least hypothetically) pass unnoticed if you were also good at hiding it.
I referred to confidence-out-of-proportion, and I think I stick with that. To my mind, a person who exhibits rational confidence in their judgement is not arrogant by definition, even if that confidence is (correctly) very high. But arrogance isn't the only way to go wrong. E.g., a software BDFL may be a jerk even if he's not arrogant, and someone who confidently makes a decision they had authority to make without consulting someone who would rather have been consulted isn't arrogant either, but may none the less have committed a faux pas. Both may be incorrectly perceived as or called arrogant.
No. There's an important difference in tone or attitude and also in content. "I have little to nothing to learn about/from this" vs "I can [will be able to] do this". Kids can be arrogant and they can be childishly optimistic. Programmers are notoriously optimistic about our ability to quickly solve problems, but even where it's not arrogance (as I think it's usually not) I wouldn't usually call it childish optimism since (1) it has lost it's charm since more is usually at stake and (2) we expect people to grow up and do better than they did when they were nine.
I believe you can become arrogant by getting used to being the smartest person in the room (or believing you are), noticing the times you readily had insights that others lack, etc.. Confirmation bias plays in, too, since as soon as you start to conceive of yourself as knowing, unless you try very hard not to, you'll take more note of events that confirm your self-assessment than that disconfirm it.
As others have noted, arrogance as described here is closely akin to the vice of pride (which is opposed to the virtue of humility). The main distinction I would draw is that arrogance to me has a stronger social aspect--a particular way of presenting oneself, born from pride. Pride itself is a spiritual state and could (at least hypothetically) pass unnoticed if you were also good at hiding it.
I referred to confidence-out-of-proportion, and I think I stick with that. To my mind, a person who exhibits rational confidence in their judgement is not arrogant by definition, even if that confidence is (correctly) very high. But arrogance isn't the only way to go wrong. E.g., a software BDFL may be a jerk even if he's not arrogant, and someone who confidently makes a decision they had authority to make without consulting someone who would rather have been consulted isn't arrogant either, but may none the less have committed a faux pas. Both may be incorrectly perceived as or called arrogant.