In season four of NBC’s “Parks and Recreation,” Paul Rudd plays a wealthy businessman named Bobby Newport who runs for city council because he’s looking for something “easy” to do. He is asked during a debate how he’d fix the town. His answer: “I have no idea.” Still, the audience goes wild, much to the frustration of his rival, Leslie Knope.

It’s funny because it’s relatable. Sooner or later, we all may encounter a Bobby Newport. What is it about an elite upbringing that seems to make people feel qualified for tasks where they have little experience? This is one of the questions that inspired a study published Monday in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

The researchers suggest that part of the answer involves what they call “overconfidence.” In several experiments, they found that people who came from a higher social class were more likely to have an inflated sense of their skills — even when tests proved that they were average. This unmerited overconfidence, they found, was interpreted by strangers as competence.

The findings highlight yet another way that family wealth and parents’ education — two of a number of factors used to assess social class in the study — affect a person’s experience as they move through the world.