The magic and minefield of confidence

CONFIDENCE is contagious. Someone declaring a position with ringing certainty is more likely to inspire than someone who hedges their bets. “We may fight them on the beaches; it depends a bit on the weather,” would have been a lot less persuasive. What is true of Winston Churchill’s wartime oratory is true in less-dramatic circumstances. A study by Matthias Brauer of the University of Mannheim and his co-authors analysed language used in letters from activist investors; it found that more confident letters were associated with more successful activist campaigns.

Confidence confers status. In a study published in 2012 by Cameron Anderson of the University of California, Berkeley and his co-authors, students on an MBA course were asked to take an online survey before they started classes. The questionnaire asked participants to say if they recognised certain names, events and works of art; unknown to them, the options included both genuine choices, such as Maximilien Robespierre and Pygmalion, and made-up ones like Bonnie Prince Lorenzo and Windemere Wild. Overconfident students who had picked more fictitious entries turned out to have the most influence on their classmates, according to end-of-term ratings.

Confidence without competence will only get you so far. If you go around telling people how much you love The One Musketeer, you will probably not be that influential. But competence without confidence imposes limits, too. Self-doubters are less likely to put themselves forward for big promotions. Irrational levels of self-belief are a hallmark of many successful founders. A recent paper by Terhi Maczulskij and Jutta Viinikainen, two Finnish academics, looked at the relationship between personality traits and employment status in Finland, and found that higher self-confidence was predictive both of entrepreneurship and of entrepreneurial success.