Of all the passenger vessels that once plied the waters of the Chesapeake Bay, perhaps none had as interesting a life as the S.S. President Warfield, flagship of the Baltimore Steam Packet Co., aka the Old Bay Line. It saw more of the world than most ships of its kind.

The ship’s namesake was Solomon Davies Warfield, president of the Old Bay Line. Warfield came from a wealthy Baltimore family with a deep affection for the South. (Or an antipathy for the North. Warfield’s father was one of the Maryland legislators imprisoned by the Union after the start of the Civil War.)

The 400-passenger boat was originally going to be called the Florida, but a month after its keel was laid at the Pusey & Jones shipyard in Wilmington, Del., Warfield died. One of Warfield’s nieces did the honors when it was christened in 1928, but not his most notorious niece, Bessie Wallis Warfield, whom the world would later know as the Duchess of Windsor.

The President Warfield was the nicest boat in the Old Bay Line’s fleet, painted a gleaming white, with a saloon paneled in ivory, a double staircase and some staterooms fitted with actual bathtubs. Dinner came from Maryland’s bounty: terrapin, canvas back duck, quail, oysters, roe. When the 18th Amendment was repealed, the ship even boasted a bar. (Before then, the space was a barbershop.)

Three months after Delbert Shorter’s food stamps were cut off, he still does not know why.

At first, he thought that his $180 a month allotment from the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called SNAP or food stamps, was just late. But as one week turned into another, Mr. Shorter, 78, who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, grew more anxious, and hungrier. He stockpiled canned foods from a church food pantry, borrowed $60 from his home health aide and turned to a senior center to help get his food stamps back.

“It’s very hard,” he said. “If I knew it was really going to come, I would not have to worry about the next meal.”

Even as New York City has embarked on a campaign to increase access to food stamps in recent months, Mr. Shorter’s plight illustrates the barriers that remain for those who are already enrolled. Many people who rely on the benefits say they have had to navigate a frustrating and overly bureaucratic process whenever there is a question or issue with their benefits, or when they are required to renew their eligibility. In the confusion, some lose the benefits.

Moral overconfidence is in line with what studies find to be our generally inflated view of ourselves. We rate ourselves as above-average drivers, investors and employees, even though math dictates that can’t be true for all of us. We also tend to believe we are less likely than the typical person to exhibit negative qualities and to experience negative life events: to get divorced, become depressed or have a heart attack.

In some ways, this cognitive bias is useful. We’re generally better served by being over confident and optimistic than by lacking confidence or being too pessimistic. Positive illusions have been shown to promote happiness, caring, productivity and resilience. As psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown have written, “These illusions help make each individual’s world a warmer and more active and beneficent place in which to live.”

But overconfidence can lead us astray. We may ignore or explain away evidence that runs counter to our established view of ourselves, maintaining faith in our virtue even as our actions indicate otherwise. We may forge ahead without pausing to reflect on the ethics of our decisions. We may be unprepared for, and ultimately overwhelmed by, the pressures of the situation. Afterward, we may offer variations on the excuse: “I was just doing what the situation demanded.”

The gap between how we’d expect ourselves to behave and how we actually behave tends to be most evident in high-pressure situations, when there is some inherent ambiguity, when there are competing claims on our sense of right and wrong, and when our moral transgressions are incremental, taking us down a slippery slope.

Moral overconfidence is in line with what studies find to be our generally inflated view of ourselves. We rate ourselves as above-average drivers, investors and employees, even though math dictates that can’t be true for all of us. We also tend to believe we are less likely than the typical person to exhibit negative qualities and to experience negative life events: to get divorced, become depressed or have a heart attack.

In some ways, this cognitive bias is useful. We’re generally better served by being over confident and optimistic than by lacking confidence or being too pessimistic. Positive illusions have been shown to promote happiness, caring, productivity and resilience. As psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown have written, “These illusions help make each individual’s world a warmer and more active and beneficent place in which to live.”

But overconfidence can lead us astray. We may ignore or explain away evidence that runs counter to our established view of ourselves, maintaining faith in our virtue even as our actions indicate otherwise. We may forge ahead without pausing to reflect on the ethics of our decisions. We may be unprepared for, and ultimately overwhelmed by, the pressures of the situation. Afterward, we may offer variations on the excuse: “I was just doing what the situation demanded.”

The gap between how we’d expect ourselves to behave and how we actually behave tends to be most evident in high-pressure situations, when there is some inherent ambiguity, when there are competing claims on our sense of right and wrong, and when our moral transgressions are incremental, taking us down a slippery slope.