Confidence is the feeling of belief or trust that a person or thing is reliable. [1] Self-confidence is trust in oneself. Self-confidence involves a positive belief that one can generally accomplish what one wishes to do in the future. [2] Self-confidence is not the same as self-esteem, which is an evaluation of one's worth. Self-confidence is related to self-efficacy—belief in one's ability to accomplish a specific task or goal. [3] [4] Confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those without it may fail because they lack it, and those with it may succeed because they have it rather than because of an innate ability or skill.
This section possibly contains original research . This section lacks secondary sources.(March 2024) |
Ideas about the causes and effects of self-confidence have appeared in English-language publications describing characteristics of a sacrilegious attitude toward God, [5] the character of the British empire, [6] and the culture of colonial-era American society. [7]
In 1890, the philosopher William James in his Principles of Psychology wrote, "Believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled... Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment".[ full citation needed ]
With World War I, psychologists praised self-confidence as greatly decreasing nervous tension, allaying fear, and ridding the battlefield of terror; they argued that soldiers who cultivated a strong and healthy body would also acquire greater self-confidence while fighting. [8] At the height of the temperance movement of the 1920s, psychologists associated self-confidence in men with remaining at home and taking care of the family when they were not working. [9] During the Great Depression, academics Philip Eisenberg and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote that a sudden negative change in one's circumstances, especially a loss of a job, could lead to decreased self-confidence, but more commonly if the jobless person believes the fault of his unemployment is his. They also noted how if individuals do not have a job long enough, they become apathetic and lose all self-confidence. [10]
In 1943, American psychologist Abraham Maslow argued in his paper "A Theory of Human Motivation" that an individual is only motivated to acquire self-confidence (one component of "esteem") after achieving what they need for physiological survival, safety, and love and belonging. He claimed that satisfaction with self-esteem led to feelings of self-confidence that, once attained, led to a desire for "self-actualization". [11] As material standards of most people rapidly rose in developed countries after World War II and fulfilled their material needs, a plethora of widely cited academic research about confidence and related concepts like self-esteem and self-efficacy emerged. [12]
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One of the earliest measures of self-confidence used a 12-point scale, ranging from a minimum score characterizing someone who is "timid and self-distrustful, shy, never makes decisions, self-effacing" to a maximum score characterizing someone who is "able to make decisions, absolutely confident and sure of his own decisions and opinions". [13] Some researchers have measured self-confidence as a simple construct divided into affective and cognitive components: anxiety as an affective aspect and self-evaluations of proficiency as a cognitive component. [14] Other researchers have used body language proxies, rather than self-reports, to measure self-confidence by having examiners measure on a scale of 1 to 5 the subject's body language such as eye contact, fidgeting, posture, facial expressions, and gestures. [15]
Some methods measure self-esteem and self-confidence in various aspects or activities, such as speaking in public spaces, academic performance, physical appearance, romantic relationships, social interactions, and athletic ability. [16] [17] In sports, researchers have measured athletes' confidence about winning upcoming matches [18] and how sensitive respondents' self-confidence is to performance and negative feedback. [19]
Abraham Maslow and others have emphasized the need to distinguish between self-confidence as a generalized personality characteristic and self-confidence concerning a specific task, ability, or challenge (i.e., self-efficacy). The term "self-confidence" typically refers to a general personality trait— in contrast, "self-efficacy" is defined by psychologist Albert Bandura as a "belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task". [20]
Various factors within and beyond an individual's control may affect their self-confidence. An individual's self-confidence can vary in different environments, such as at home or at school, and concerning different types of relationships and situations. [21] When people attribute their success to a matter under their control, they are less likely to be confident about being successful in the future. If someone attributes their failure to a factor beyond their control, they are more likely to be confident about succeeding in the future. [22] If a person believes they failed to achieve a goal because of a factor that was beyond their control, they are more likely to be more self-confident that they can achieve the goal in the future. [23] One's self-confidence often increases as one satisfactorily completes particular activities. [24] American social psychologist Leon Festinger found that self-confidence in an individual's ability may only rise or fall when that individual can compare themselves to others who are roughly similar, in a competitive environment. [25]
A person can possess self-confidence in their ability to complete a specific task (self-efficacy)—e.g. cook a good meal or write a good novel—even though they may lack general self-confidence, or conversely be self-confident though they lack the self-efficacy to achieve a particular task. These two types of self-confidence are, however, correlated with each other, and for this reason, can be easily conflated. [26]
Social psychologists have found self-confidence to be correlated with other psychological variables including saving money, [27] influencing others, [28] and being a responsible student. [29] Self-confidence affects interest, enthusiasm, and self-regulation. [30] Self-confidence is important for accomplishing goals and improving performance. [31] Marketing researchers have found that the general self-confidence of a person is negatively correlated with their level of anxiety. [32] Self-confidence increases a person's general well-being [33] and one's motivation [34] which often increases performance. [35] It also increases one's ability to deal with stress and mental health. [36] The more self-confident an individual is, the less likely they are to conform to the judgments of others. [37] Higher confidence is correlated with individuals setting higher goals. When people face feelings of discontent because they do not accomplish a certain goal, people who have higher self-confidence may become even more persistent in accomplishing their goals, whereas those with low self-confidence are more prone to giving up quickly. [38] [39] Albert Bandura argued that a person's perceived confidence indicates capability. If people do not believe that they are capable of coping, they experience disruption which lowers their confidence about their performance. [40] Salespeople who are high in self-confidence tend to set higher goals for themselves, which makes them more likely to stay employed, [41] yield higher revenues, and generate higher customer service satisfaction. [42] In certain fields of medical practice, patients experience a lack of self-confidence during the recovery period. This is commonly referred to as DSF or defectum sui fiducia from the Latin for lack of self-confidence. This can be the case after a stroke, when the patient refrains from using a weaker lower limb due to fear of it not being strong enough. [43]
On the overconfidence effect, Martin Hilbert argues that confidence bias can be explained by a noisy conversion of objective evidence into subjective estimates, where noise is defined as the mixing of memories during the observing and remembering process process. [44] Dominic D. P. Johnson and James H. Fowler write that "overconfidence maximizes individual fitness and populations tend to become overconfident, as long as benefits from contested resources are sufficiently large compared with the cost of competition". [45] In studies of implicit self-esteem, researchers have found that people may consciously overreport their levels of self-esteem. [46] Inaccurate self-evaluation is commonly observed in healthy populations. In the extreme, large differences between one's self-perception and one's actual behaviour are a hallmark of several disorders that have important implications for understanding treatment-seeking and compliance. [47] Overconfidence supports delusional thinking, such as frequently occurs in individuals with schizophrenia. [48]
Whether a person, in making a decision, seeks out additional sources of information depends on their level of self-confidence specific to that area. As the complexity of a decision increases, a person is more likely to be influenced by another person and seek out additional information. [2] Several psychologists suggest that self-confident people are more willing to examine evidence that both supports and contradicts their attitudes. Meanwhile, people who are less self-confident and more defensive may prefer attitudinal information over information that challenges their perspectives. [49] When individuals with low self-confidence receive feedback from others, they are averse to receiving information about their relative ability and negative informative feedback, and not averse to receiving positive feedback. [50] If new information about an individual's performance is negative feedback, this may interact with a negative affective state (low self-confidence) causing the individual to become demoralized, which in turn induces a self-defeating attitude that increases the likelihood of failure in the future more than if they did not lack self-confidence. [51] People may be more self-confident about what they believe if they consult sources of information that agree with their world views. [52] People may deceive themselves about their positive qualities and the negative qualities of others so that they can display greater self-confidence than they might otherwise feel, thereby enabling them to advance socially and materially. [53]
People with high self-confidence are more likely to impress others, as others perceive them as more knowledgeable and more likely to make correct judgments. [54] Despite this, a negative correlation is sometimes found between the level of their self-confidence and the accuracy of their claims. [55] When people are uncertain and unknowledgeable about a topic, they are more likely to believe the testimony, [56] and follow the advice of those that seem self-confident. [57] However, expert psychological testimony on the factors that influence eyewitness memory appears to reduce juror reliance on self-confidence. [56]
People prefer leaders with greater self-confidence over those with less self-confidence. [58] Self-confident leaders tend to influence others through persuasion instead of resorting to coercive means. They are more likely to resolve issues by referring them to another qualified person or calling upon bureaucratic procedures, which avoid personal involvement. [59] Others suggest that self-confidence does not affect leadership style but is only correlated with years of supervisory experience and self-perceptions of power. [28]
Social scientists have discovered that self-confidence operates differently in different categories of people.
In children, self-confidence emerges differently than in adults. For example, only children as a group may be more self-confident than other children. [13] If children are self-confident, they may be more likely to sacrifice immediate recreational time for possible rewards in the future, enhancing their self-regulatory capability. [60] Successful performance of children in music increases feelings of self-confidence, increasing motivation for study. [61] By adolescence, youth who have little contact with friends tend to have low self-confidence. [62] In adolescents, low self-confidence may be a predictor of loneliness. [63]
In general, students who perform well have increased confidence, which likely in turn encourages them to take greater responsibility to complete tasks. [64] Teachers affect the self-confidence of their students depending on how they treat them. [65] Students who perform better receive more positive evaluation reports and have greater self-confidence. [66] Characteristically low-achieving students report less confidence, while characteristically high-performing students report higher self-confidence. [67] Extracurricular activities in school settings can boost confidence in students at earlier ages. These include participation in games or sports, visual and performing arts, and public speaking. [68]
In a phenomenon known as stereotype threat, African American students perform more poorly on exams (relative to White American students) if they must reveal their racial identities before the exam. [69] A similar phenomenon has been found in female students' performance (relative to male students) on math tests. [70] The opposite has been observed in Asian Americans, whose confidence becomes tied up in expectations that they will succeed by both parents and teachers and who claim others perceive them as excelling academically more than they are. [71]
Male university students may be more confident than their female counterparts. [17] In regards to inter-ethnic interaction and language learning, those who engage more with people of different ethnicity and language become more self-confident in interacting with them. [72]
Women who are either high or low in general self-confidence are more likely to be persuaded to change their opinion than women with medium self-confidence. However, when specific high confidence (self-efficacy) is high, generalized confidence plays less of a role. [73] Men who have low generalized self-confidence are more easily persuaded than men of high generalized self-confidence. [74]
Women tend to respond less to negative feedback and be more averse to negative feedback than men. [50] In experiments conducted by economists Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund, the researchers found that male overconfidence and male preference for competition contributed to higher male participation in a competitive tournament scheme, while risk and feedback aversion played a negligible role. [75] Some scholars partly attribute the fact of women being less likely to persist in engineering college than men to women's diminished sense of self-confidence. [76]
More self-confident women may receive high-performance evaluations but not be as well-liked as men who engage in the same behaviour. [77] Confident women may be considered a better job candidate than both men and women who behaved modestly. [78] Male common stock investors trade 45% more than their female counterparts, which they attribute to greater recklessness (though also self-confidence) of men, reducing men's net returns by 2.65 percentage points per year versus women's 1.72 percentage points. [79] Women report lower self-confidence levels than men in supervising subordinates. [80]
One study found that women who viewed commercials with women in traditional gender roles appeared less self-confident in giving a speech than those who viewed commercials with women taking on more masculine roles. [15] Such self-confidence may also be related to body image, as one study found a sample of overweight people in Australia and the US are less self-confident about their body's performance than people of average weight, and the difference is even greater for women than for men. [81] Others found that if a newborn is separated from its mother upon delivery, the mother is less self-confident in her ability to raise that child than one who was not separated from her child. Furthermore, women who initially had low self-confidence are likely to experience a larger drop of self-confidence after separation from their children than women with relatively higher self-confidence. [82] Heterosexual men who exhibit greater self-confidence relative to other men more easily attract single and partnered women. [83]
Self-confidence is one of the most influential factors in how well an athlete performs in a competition. [84] In particular, "robust self-confidence beliefs" are correlated with aspects of mental toughness—the ability to cope better than one's opponents and remain focused under pressure. [85] These traits enable athletes to "bounce back from adversity". [86] When athletes confront stress while playing sports, their self-confidence decreases. However, feedback from their team members in the form of emotional and informational support reduces the extent to which stresses in sports reduce their self-confidence. At high levels of support, performance-related stress does not affect self-confidence. [87] Among gymnasts, those who tend to talk to themselves in an instructional format tend to be more self-confident than those who do not. [88] In a group, members' desire for success and confidence can also be related. Groups that had a higher desire for success did better in performance than groups with a weaker desire. The more frequently a group succeeded, the more interest they had in the activity and success. [89]
The utility of self-confidence may vary by culture. Some find Asians perform better when they lack confidence, especially when compared to North Americans. [90]
Self-esteem is confidence in one's own worth, abilities, or morals. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs about oneself as well as emotional states, such as triumph, despair, pride, and shame. Smith and Mackie define it by saying "The self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, is the positive or negative evaluations of the self, as in how we feel about it ."
In social psychology, fundamental attribution error, also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is a cognitive attribution bias where observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors. In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality and underattribute them to the situation or context. Although personality traits and predispositions are considered to be observable facts in psychology, the fundamental attribution error is an error because it misinterprets their effects.
In the psychology of self, one's self-concept is a collection of beliefs about oneself. Generally, self-concept embodies the answer to the question "Who am I?".
The illusion of control is the tendency for people to overestimate their ability to control events. It was named by U.S. psychologist Ellen Langer and is thought to influence gambling behavior and belief in the paranormal. Along with illusory superiority and optimism bias, the illusion of control is one of the positive illusions.
Locus of control is the degree to which people believe that they, as opposed to external forces, have control over the outcome of events in their lives. The concept was developed by Julian B. Rotter in 1954, and has since become an aspect of personality psychology. A person's "locus" is conceptualized as internal or external.
Self-handicapping is a cognitive strategy by which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting self-esteem. It was first theorized by Edward E. Jones and Steven Berglas, according to whom self-handicaps are obstacles created, or claimed, by the individual in anticipation of failing performance.
Depressive realism is the hypothesis developed by Lauren Alloy and Lyn Yvonne Abramson that depressed individuals make more realistic inferences than non-depressed individuals. Although depressed individuals are thought to have a negative cognitive bias that results in recurrent, negative automatic thoughts, maladaptive behaviors, and dysfunctional world beliefs, depressive realism argues not only that this negativity may reflect a more accurate appraisal of the world but also that non-depressed individuals' appraisals are positively biased.
Social comparison theory, initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, centers on the belief that individuals drive to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others to reduce uncertainty in these domains and learn how to define the self. Comparing oneself to others socially is a form of measurement and self-assessment to identify where an individual stands according to their own set of standards and emotions about themselves.
Terror management theory (TMT) is both a social and evolutionary psychology theory originally proposed by Jeff Greenberg, Sheldon Solomon, and Tom Pyszczynski and codified in their book The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (2015). It proposes that a basic psychological conflict results from having a self-preservation instinct while realizing that death is inevitable and to some extent unpredictable. This conflict produces terror, which is managed through a combination of escapism and cultural beliefs that act to counter biological reality with more significant and enduring forms of meaning and value.
In psychology, self-efficacy is an individual's belief in their capacity to act in the ways necessary to reach specific goals. The concept was originally proposed by the psychologist Albert Bandura.
The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. Overconfidence is one example of a miscalibration of subjective probabilities. Throughout the research literature, overconfidence has been defined in three distinct ways: (1) overestimation of one's actual performance; (2) overplacement of one's performance relative to others; and (3) overprecision in expressing unwarranted certainty in the accuracy of one's beliefs.
Caring in intimate relationships is the practice of providing care and support to an intimate relationship partner. Caregiving behaviours are aimed at reducing the partner's distress and supporting their coping efforts in situations of either threat or challenge. Caregiving may include emotional support and/or instrumental support. Effective caregiving behaviour enhances the care-recipient's psychological well-being, as well as the quality of the relationship between the caregiver and the care-recipient. However, certain suboptimal caregiving strategies may be either ineffective or even detrimental to coping.
Susan Tufts Fiske is an American psychologist who serves as the Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. She is a social psychologist known for her work on social cognition, stereotypes, and prejudice. Fiske leads the Intergroup Relations, Social Cognition, and Social Neuroscience Lab at Princeton University. Her theoretical contributions include the development of the stereotype content model, ambivalent sexism theory, power as control theory, and the continuum model of impression formation.
Positive illusions are unrealistically favorable attitudes that people have towards themselves or to people that are close to them. Positive illusions are a form of self-deception or self-enhancement that feel good; maintain self-esteem; or avoid discomfort, at least in the short term. There are three general forms: inflated assessment of one's own abilities, unrealistic optimism about the future, and an illusion of control. The term "positive illusions" originates in a 1988 paper by Taylor and Brown. "Taylor and Brown's (1988) model of mental health maintains that certain positive illusions are highly prevalent in normal thought and predictive of criteria traditionally associated with mental health."
Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem. Self-enhancement involves a preference for positive over negative self-views. It is one of the three self-evaluation motives along with self-assessment and self-verification . Self-evaluation motives drive the process of self-regulation, that is, how people control and direct their own actions.
In social psychology, illusory superiority is a cognitive bias wherein people overestimate their own qualities and abilities compared to others. Illusory superiority is one of many positive illusions, relating to the self, that are evident in the study of intelligence, the effective performance of tasks and tests, and the possession of desirable personal characteristics and personality traits. Overestimation of abilities compared to an objective measure is known as the overconfidence effect.
Implicit self-esteem refers to a person's disposition to evaluate themselves in a spontaneous, automatic, or unconscious manner. It contrasts with explicit self-esteem, which entails more conscious and reflective self-evaluation. Both explicit and implicit self-esteem are constituents of self-esteem.
Goal orientation, or achievement orientation, is an "individual disposition towards developing or validating one's ability in achievement settings". In general, an individual can be said to be mastery or performance oriented, based on whether one's goal is to develop one's ability or to demonstrate one's ability, respectively. A mastery orientation is also sometimes referred to as a learning orientation.
Psychological hardiness, alternatively referred to as personality hardiness or cognitive hardiness in the literature, is a personality style first introduced by Suzanne C. Kobasa in 1979. Kobasa described a pattern of personality characteristics that distinguished managers and executives who remained healthy under life stress, as compared to those who developed health problems. In the following years, the concept of hardiness was further elaborated in a book and a series of research reports by Salvatore Maddi, Kobasa and their graduate students at the University of Chicago.
Puritanical bias refers to the tendency to attribute cause of an undesirable outcome or wrongdoing by an individual to a moral deficiency or lack of self control rather than taking into account the impact of broader societal determinants. An example might be, "These people sit around all day in their apartments on welfare watching TV, but won't take the time to get out and find a job!" In this case, a selection of persons might have existed for some time under dire economic and/or socially oppressive circumstances, but individuals from that selection have been cognitively dis-empowered by these circumstances to decide or act on decisions to obtain a given goal.
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