Sometimes right, Sometimes wrong, but always Confident
If I asked you if you knew how a zipper works, would you answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’? If you answered ‘yes’ and then I asked you to explain the steps involved in a zipper’s operation, what exactly could you tell me? It turns out most of us do say 'yes' but very few of us can actually offer a reasonable explanation of how a zipper works beyond saying something about the teeth coming together to... er… fasten the zip.
This example, drawn from Sloman and Fernbach’s excellent book The Knowledge Illusion, speaks to how much we think we know and even claim publicly we know, but don’t really know.
This is why when we offer people self-assessments we ask them not only to calculate what they know but also rate how confident they are in their response. It provides revealing insight. It turns out we are often highly overconfident in what we think we know. This can have serious implications of course: in a health and safety situation my overconfident attitude could lead to me making serious, and possibly harmful, mistakes. In less hazardous situations the implication might be less likely to cause personal injury, but can have lasting ramifications for the business. Indeed, it might be argued that most of the errors of judgement we witness or make ourselves are the result of overconfidence rather than wilful neglect.
So what can we do to match our confidence to our competence? In order to begin to answer that we need to explore in a little detail what makes up confidence.
Self-confidence and self-concept
We can’t explore confidence without taking self-concept into account. Our self-concept informs, shores up or, conversely, undermines our confidence. Put simply, self-concept is our individual and personal evaluation of our abilities or competence across a wide range of domains: academic and cognitive skills, physical skills, physical attractiveness and interpersonal skills.
Our self-concepts can be described normatively for example ‘I can create spreadsheets’ or ‘I can code software’, or be evaluations of less or harder to define skills, for example ‘I work effectively in a team’ or ‘my proposals are well written’.
While self-concept relates to specific domains, confidence is a more general, broader assessment of abilities. Importantly, while self-concept is relatively stable (if I can create spreadsheets today, I am likely to believe I can create them tomorrow), confidence is volatile. Our confidence can fluctuate for a number of reasons - we’re under stress, we are fatigued, we’ve made a mistake and we feel stupid, etc.
The implications here are many. But to identify two:
- We have to learn what triggers our low confidence moments and learn to manage them. This might involve how we manage our ‘self-talk’, that narrative in our heads that makes sense and explains ourselves to ourselves. Equally, it may mean revising our initial assessments of our ability or competence and working on our knowledge or skills.
- We should work to calibrate our confidence in our self- assessments, remembering that too little confidence can be as bad as too much. One of the findings of using our self-assessment tool Kaplan Insight to assess the confidence and competence of over 10,000 respondents has been to reveal individuals who lack confidence in areas where they show, in fact, a great deal of competence.
Confidence is the central theme of Kaplan’s new Confident New Hire Programme. Learn more about it here.