The Confidence Code (5 page)

These dark spots of doubt we hide, and sometimes even nurture, need to be vanquished. Confidence is no longer the sideshow, it’s the main event.

We might like to believe that keeping our noses to the grindstone, focusing on every detail, and doing everything perfectly are the materials that build a career. Or that overconfidence will lead to ruinous results. In fact, more often than not, the opposite is true.

Cameron Anderson, a psychologist who works in the business school at the University of California, Berkeley, has made a career of studying overconfidence. In 2009, he decided to conduct tests to compare the relative value of confidence and competence.

He came up with a novel idea. He gave a group of 242 students a list of historical names and events, and asked them to tick off the ones they knew. Among the names were some well-disguised fakes: a Queen Shaddock made an appearance, as did a Mr. Galileo Lovano, and an event dubbed Murphy’s Last Ride. Anderson found a link between the number of fakes a student picked and how excessively confident the student was. (The very fact that these students picked fakes instead of simply not checking the answers showed they not only were less able, but also believed they knew more than they actually did.) At the end of the semester, Anderson conducted a survey of the group. The students who had picked the most fakes had achieved the highest social status, which Anderson defines as the respect, prominence, and influence an individual enjoys in the eyes of others. Translated into the work environment, he says, higher status means you are more admired, listened to, and have more sway over your organization’s discussions and decisions. So despite being the less competent students, they ended up being the most respected and had the most influence with their peers.

His findings upend most assumptions and in some ways they are dismaying. Confidence matters more than competence? We didn’t want to believe it, and we pressed Anderson for alternative theories. But deep down we knew we’d seen the same phenomenon for years. Within any particular organization, from the boardroom to the PTA, some individuals tend to be more admired and more listened to than others. They’re the ones at meetings who lead the discussion and often dictate the outcome. Their ideas kick up to the next level. They are not necessarily the most competent people in the room; they are just the most confident.

More disturbing for women who count on competence as the key to success is Anderson’s insistence that actual ability barely matters. “When people are confident, when they think they are good at something, regardless of how good they actually are, they display a lot of nonverbal and verbal behavior,” Anderson explained. He mentioned their expansive body language, their lower vocal tone, and a tendency to speak early and often in a calm, relaxed manner. “They do a lot of things that make them look very confident in the eyes of others,” he added. “Whether they are good or not is kind of irrelevant.”

It’s confidence that sways people. We may not realize it but we all give confidence inordinate weight and we respect people who project it. Anderson is convinced this explains why less competent people are so often promoted over their more able colleagues. Infuriatingly, there aren’t even necessarily negative consequences for that lack of competence. (This all explains a lot about high school.) Among Anderson’s students, confidence without competence had no negative effects. They were simply admired by the rest of the group and awarded a high social status. “The most confident people were just considered the most beloved in the group,” he said. “Their overconfidence did not come across as narcissistic.”

That is a critical point. Overconfidence can also be read as arrogance or bluster, but Anderson thinks the reason the more confident students didn’t alienate the others is that they, like those Columbia Business School students,
weren’t faking their confidence.
They genuinely believed they were good, and that self-belief was what came across. Fake confidence, he told us, just doesn’t work in the same way because we can see the “tells.” No matter how much bravado they muster, when people don’t genuinely believe they are good, we pick up on the shifting eyes and rising voice and other giveaways. We’re not always conscious of it, but most of us have a great BS radar and can spot fake confidence a mile off.

We both wondered, perhaps a little vindictively, whether Anderson believes that overconfident people are just stupid. Are they at all aware that their confidence outstrips their abilities? They may, in fact, be less intelligent, he conceded, but he also pointed out that he’s focusing on a relatively modest amount of overconfidence. Even a popular pilot has to be able to land a plane. If the gap between confidence and competence grows too large, overconfidence does become a weakness and a liability. But that’s not a problem most women need to worry about.

Once we got over our feeling that Anderson’s work suggests a world that is deeply unfair, we could see a useful lesson: For decades, women have misunderstood an important law of the professional jungle. Having talent isn’t merely about being competent; confidence is actually a part of that talent. You have to have it to be good at your job.

Getting to the Zen of It

When we aren’t confident, we don’t succeed as we should. We can’t even envision the work we could be doing, or the levels we could reach, or the satisfaction we could have. We can’t contribute fully to a system that is in great need of female leadership.

But confidence provides so much more than that. It tends to get unfairly tagged as a showy quality that is all about competition and outward success. We found it has a much broader impact. Scholars are coming to see it as an essential element of internal well-being and happiness, a necessity for a fulfilled life. Without it you can’t achieve flow, the almost euphoric state described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as perfect concentration; the alignment of one’s skills with the task at hand. Flow is like being in the athletic zone; it is a state of mastery impossible to reach without confidence.

A Buddhist meditation center made for a welcome moment of calm after the noisy and unsettling explorations of sports arenas, military schools, and collegiate lecture halls. We were looking for insight into what confidence might do for us as people, as social animals, beyond winning games and points with the boss, and we hoped we might find it in a more spiritual realm.

Sharon Salzberg, a leading Buddhist expert, author of a number of best sellers, including
Real Happiness at Work
, and a friend of a friend, was in town leading a meditation session. We found her on the top floor of a five-floor walk-up, in a wood-paneled room full of warmth and light, holding forth on the virtues of equanimity. Three dozen extremely centered-looking students filled the room and we were quickly inspired to put all hard questions aside for an hour, and go limp.

When Salzberg later turned to our subject, we heard something that clicked. “I think confidence is the way we meet our circumstances, whether they are wondrous and wonderful or really hard and difficult,” she offered, with a tranquil smile. “It’s almost like a wholeheartedness, where we’re not holding back. We’re not fragmented. We’re not divided. We’re just going towards what’s happening. There’s an energy to it. I think that’s confidence. And it’s absolutely part of human fulfillment.” We were captivated by the idea of confidence as an essential, elemental energy. It was a twist, but it fit. We realized we were beginning to amass some related, yet different descriptions—“purity of action,” “wholeheartedness,” “energy.” They seemed to be pushing us toward a very basic question: What exactly is confidence anyway? Before we spent any more time trying to catch it in action, examine where it comes from, or ask why women have so little, we figured we’d better give confidence a formal definition.

2

DO MORE, THINK LESS

Like us, neuroscientist Adam Kepecs is searching for confidence. But, unlike us, he has a preference for small, furry rodents. Rats, says Kepecs, are less complicated than people. They don’t bury their basic instincts in layers of tangled thought and emotion. People will tell you they are confident, when, inside, they’re quivering wrecks. Or the opposite. They’ll tell you they feel insecure, but then their actions suggest boldness. As research subjects, Kepecs finds people unsatisfactory.

He is trying to get to a notion of confidence that is very basic: He calls it “statistical confidence,” or, in layman’s terms, the measure of our certainty about a choice we’ve made. His groundbreaking studies have caught the attention of psychologists because they suggest confidence is a quality all species possess. Who knew rats could be confident, too?

We were intrigued by Kepecs’s work, and hoped that what he explores in rats might help us understand what constitutes basic confidence in humans. Confident decision making in rats, he believes, shares many similarities with human decision making.

Imagine, he told us, that you’re driving to a new restaurant. You’ve been given the directions and, at the light, you make a turn. You drive a mile, and then another mile. No restaurant. At some point you start thinking, “I’m sure I should be there by now. Did I make a wrong turn?” Whether or not you stick it out and keep driving depends on how confident you are of that turn you made. It’s that “sticking it out” piece that Kepecs measures in the rats’ behavior, and it suggests that confidence, stripped down, is a pretty basic commodity.

What is confidence, really? Well, it’s certainly not what we anticipated it was when we started researching this book.

Confidence is not, as we once believed, simply feeling good about yourself, saying you’re great, perfect just as you are, and can do whatever you want to do. That way of thinking hasn’t really worked for us, has it? Just saying “I can do that” doesn’t mean that you believe it or will act on it. If it did, therapists would be out of business pretty quickly. And hearing “You are wonderful” from someone else doesn’t help, either. If all we needed were a few words of reassurance, or a pat on the back, we’d all be productive, thin, and nice to our in-laws as we commandeered the corner office.

We also had a vision of confidence as a set of mannerisms and an expression of power. The most confident person seems to be the one who speaks the loudest and the most often. The friend who always knows he is right or the colleague who dominates every meeting. Aren’t those the most confident people, the ones who just, well, sound so confident?

We were counting on Kepecs to help us out, and we met him at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a dazzling setting, right on the ocean on Long Island, forty-five minutes east of Manhattan.

Dangling over our heads as we wound our way to his upstairs office was an enormous, Dale Chihuly glass sculpture—a gift to DNA pioneer James Watson, who transformed the research center into one of the best in the world. The swirl of luminous yellow and green tentacles, capped with bubbles of varying sizes and shapes, demanded a moment of contemplation. Extremely Dr. Seuss, we remarked. Kepecs, a blue-jeans clad, boyish thirty-nine, with dark curls and a hint of Hungarian in his voice, laughingly explained that the sculpture is actually an ode to the shape of neurons. Naturally.

For the next few hours, he was our generous translator of this unfamiliar world—helping us look for connections between his rodents and the human confidence code.

We watched as Kepecs put a rat in a large box. The rat was wearing what is essentially a permanent white top hat housing an array of electrodes. It had been surgically attached, and Kepecs assured us that the rats no longer feel it at all. Inserted into one side of the box, level with the rat’s nose, were three white containers, or ports, about two inches wide. The middle one released odors. The rat put its nose into that port and sniffed a mix of two smells. The mix varied in percentages; sometimes the stronger smell was clear and, at other times, teasing apart the combination was trickier. The rat’s job was to figure out the predominant smell, and then put his nose in either the left or right port to indicate his decision. If he gets it right, Kepecs explained, and chooses the correct port, he’ll get a drop of water as a reward. But the rat has to wait for the drop of water. If he’s sure about his decision, he’ll wait as long as it takes for the water to come. If he’s doubtful, he can give up on getting that particular drop, and start a new round. But giving up means the rat loses not only the chance of getting the drop, but also all of the time it already invested in waiting for the drop. The rat faces a real trade-off, a fundamental, familiar dilemma, and one that turns out to be shared across species. We watched our rat put his nose to the left, and then wait for what seemed an endless . . . eight seconds. That’s a long wait for a rat, and so there was plenty of confidence on display. Would it prove to be justified?

Bravo! We exchanged a smile as the drop of water materialized. Kepecs warned us not to get any ideas about how “smart” the furry creatures were. The rats in this particular experiment had done the drill countless times, and they were all pretty good at figuring out which odor corresponded to the left or right port. Kepecs, remember, isn’t focused on
whether
his rats make the right choice. He’s measuring
how firmly they believe
they’ve made the right choice. That is the confidence Kepecs works to isolate—the strength of a rat’s belief in its decision. It’s a confidence that is demonstrated by a rat’s act of waiting, and then measured by the length of time it’s willing to stick it out, braving a real risk of failure, waiting for that drop of water. It was extraordinary to us that not only could these rodents apparently make what was a calculation about odds and stakes, but that they were then willing, essentially, to bet on their decision.

There is something elemental to this expression of confidence. The rats are making an informed prediction, almost robotic in its execution. Human brains, too, at times, can also act almost robotically. Every day we make hundreds of decisions, almost unconsciously, that require basic confidence—how quickly to reach out to hit the snooze button on our alarm clock, how far to bend over to load the dishwasher. Kepecs has pinpointed the part of the brain that rats use for these decisions, the orbitofrontal cortex, and he thinks statistical confidence for humans will be found to hail from the same region.