The Confidence Code (9 page)

Suomi is making huge strides toward answering that question. His wildlife laboratory has become ground zero in the fast-expanding study of the biology of personality.

Specifically, we were on the trail of a confidence gene, wondering whether we could find proof of what was long our gut instinct: some people are just born confident. You know the type, people who appear to glide effortlessly through life, whatever it throws at them. The people for whom no task is too difficult, no situation too agonizing, and no challenge too great. They exude an inherent, enviable, even slightly irritating, air of ease. The professional mother who juggles children, job, and spouse and never questions whether she’s doing right by either her family or her career. The young man who sets off backpacking through Costa Rica, just assuming that it will all work out. Those people who have no qualms voicing opinions in public or demanding a raise in private. Their parents, friends, and spouses say they’ve always been that way, making their seemingly unshakable confidence appear all the more unattainable.

Did their upbringing create that confidence? Or is there a DNA sequence that hatches it? Is confidence baked into our personalities?

Suomi has been asking the same questions and trying to find answers by studying the personalities of his monkeys. Lately, he’s been focused on the origins of anxiety, which essentially means, Suomi told us, that he’s also looking at confidence. Monkeys with confidence aren’t apt to be anxious, and vice versa.

Based on his research and that of others in the field, Suomi has concluded that some monkeys are indeed born with the hard-wiring to be more confident than others. “We now know that there’s an underlying biology,” he told us. “Certain biological characteristics show up very early in life and, if you don’t do anything about the environment, are likely to be fairly stable throughout infancy, childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.”

It’s an enormous help to Suomi’s research that monkeys grow up four times as fast as humans. He’s been able to observe several generations already. He and his team track the monkeys’ behavior from birth, noting parenting techniques, and marking the frequency with which the offspring socialize with others, dominate the playground, take risks, or hang by themselves.

As we watched the monkeys more closely, with color commentary provided by Suomi and his researchers, it was indeed possible to pick out the different behavior patterns that Suomi described. Some lolled about down by the lake, while others engaged in a game of chase. Several mothers kept watch on their offsprings’ every move. We spotted a few of the young monkeys sitting more quietly, close to the adults. One showed almost no interest in even observing the nearby activity. In all, the scene was not unlike what you might see at a grade school playground: Play and interaction dominate, but a few youngsters hang back. Their behavior is typical, Suomi said, for his less confident, more anxious monkeys.

Still, we wondered, as we examined the tableau before us, whether we could really draw conclusions about human confidence based on monkey behavior. Monkeys are our ancient ancestors, and our research had reminded us that we share 90 percent of our genetic makeup. But Suomi explained there’s another, even more essential tie between us, one he discovered. The nimble rhesus monkey is the only primate that shares with us a particular gene variation that researchers are coming to see as essential to personality formation. The gene is called SLC6A4, or the serotonin transporter gene, and it directly affects confidence.

We’d heard of serotonin, and you probably have, too. It has a big impact on mood and behavior; more of it can make you feel calm and happy. Prozac and all of its pharmaceutical relatives boost serotonin levels. Serotonin, in short, is good stuff and SLC6A4 is the gene that regulates our serotonin levels by recycling it through our system.

This serotonin transporter gene comes in a few varieties, or in scientific terms, it has a polymorphism, which means it plays favorites; some of us have more efficient versions of it than others. One of the variations is made up of two short strands, which is fairly rare, but people with that genetic hand process serotonin badly, magnifying their risk of depression and anxiety. Another version contains a long and a short strand, which means better, but still inefficient, serotonin use. The third variant contains two long strands, which allows for the best use of the hormone. The people with that variant, scientists believe, are more naturally resilient, which is a key criterion for confidence.

Dozens of studies have examined the SLC6A4 gene in humans. Most have demonstrated clear ties to depression and anxiety disorders and, recently, as scientists have turned toward the study of healthy mental attributes, the gene has been linked with happiness and optimism. Experts like Suomi, who know their way backwards and forwards around the gene, say it’s clear that serotonin, especially in its ability to inhibit anxiety, sets the stage for confidence.

Years ago, when he saw the early research, Suomi, who had already conducted decades of meticulously documented behavioral studies of his monkeys, started to suspect the serotonin transporter gene might play a role in what he was seeing. He ran DNA tests on the whole bunch, looking for the serotonin gene. The genetics, when cross-referenced with all of his mounds of data, accurately predicted the behavior he had already recorded: which monkeys had been born depressed, more withdrawn and anxious, and which monkeys were more resilient. He’d hit the jackpot.

We gazed around his office, which was jammed with files and decorated with photos of his brood, many of which were vintage eighties and hanging askew. One, in particular, bears an uncanny resemblance to photos of our children we display around the house— Cocoabean, one of the first monkeys born in Maryland, is taking a glorious leap into the pond of the field station, while her furry pal Eric looks on. The careful nurturing, observation and testing that’s been Suomi’s life and passion for decades has produced results even he could not have imagined. Happily for us, that work offers a new lens on the genetic origins of confidence, even if in humans confident behavior would seem to be more subtle and varied than it is in monkeys. Being on the retiring side himself, Suomi admitted a certain fascination with our topic. Ruddy-faced, mild-mannered, and sporting a comfortable blue cardigan, he turned his bespectacled gaze away from his research and toward us, and started to describe the variations in confidence he has come to observe.

He has found, for example, that the monkeys with genes rendering them more resilient, or less anxious (the longer strands), tend to be more willing to engage with others, to take risks, and to become leaders of the group. In other words, they show more confidence in their actions. His description of the complex social structure of the rhesus is fascinating and includes patterns of behavior that sound suspiciously like office politics. The leaders focus on alliances and occupy the best real estate; their corner office is a corncob case near the pond. They make their power position clear with a silent, open-mouthed stare at minions and challengers. The smartest up-and-comers are obsequious; the most effective genuflections are grimaces with teeth bared or rumps shoved in the air. The monkeys that have the other versions (the shorter strands) of the serotonin gene don’t always exhibit behavior as dramatic or as incapacitating as depression. But, right from birth, Suomi has found them to be less engaged, fearful or clingy and, as they grow older, they are the ones that are less willing to play in risky ways. In other words, they appear to be less confident. Interestingly, in some monkeys, anxiety and lack of confidence manifest themselves as hyperactivity and aggression. It happens more often in the males. That sounded similar to our world as well.

The Human Code

So is confidence encoded in our genes? Yes—at least in part. That’s the belief of not only Suomi, but also every one of the dozen or more scientists we interviewed. We all enter the world with a propensity for more or less confidence, and the case goes well beyond the serotonin transporter gene we share with rhesus monkeys. “A lot of personality is biologically driven,” says Dr. Jay Lombard, one of the founders of Genomind, a pioneering genetic testing company. “It is clearly both nature and nurture, and understanding what genes do to affect the biology of the brain, to create temperament, is something the NIH has now recognized as a priority.”

In terms of scale and duration, one of the most compelling studies that links genes and confidence is a project being conducted by Robert Plomin, a renowned behavioral geneticist at King’s College in London. While he can’t quite replicate the perfectly sealed and studied Suomi-like habitat, he comes close. And he’s doing it with humans.

Twenty years ago, Plomin decided to undertake an ambitious study of 15,000 sets of twins in Britain. He’s followed them from birth into adulthood, gaining vast amounts of data on everything from intelligence to a propensity for disease to gender roles. Some of those twins are identical, with identical DNA; others are fraternal and share only similar DNA in the way that ordinary siblings do. Twins have long been the most effective subjects for the study of the nature versus nurture conundrum.

In his recent examination of the academic performance of these twins, Plomin decided to take a closer look at confidence, or the faith the children had in their ability to do well. At age seven, and then again at nine, the twins had been given a standard IQ test and they were also tested academically in three subjects: math, writing, and science. Next, they were asked to rate
how confident they were about their abilities
in each subject. Plomin and his researchers also factored in reports from the teachers. Once all of the data had been cross-referenced, the research team was struck by two findings. The students’ self-perceived ability rating, or SPA, was a significant predictor of achievement, even more important than IQ. Put simply, confidence trumps IQ in predicting success. Plomin and his team had found in kids what Cameron Anderson had discovered in adults.

The researchers also found that a lot of confidence comes in our genes. They’d separated the confidence scores of the identical twins from those of the fraternal twins, and found the scores of the identical twins to be more similar. Plomin’s findings suggest that the correlation between genes and confidence may be as high as 50 percent, and may be even more closely correlated than the link between genes and IQ.

That a personality trait as seemingly amorphous as confidence might be every bit as inheritable as intelligence struck us as pretty far-fetched, until we discovered we’d ventured upon an entire field of study, the genetics of personality, at a remarkably explosive stage. Countless breakthroughs in the field of behavioral genetics and biology over the past decade have created ever more sophisticated ways to examine the mind in action as well as cheaper, more efficient methods to sequence and scrutinize DNA. Hundreds of these studies—involving genes, brain fluid, behavior, and neuroimaging—make a strong case that large chunks of our personality are formed at conception. Researchers have pinpointed genes that influence everything from shyness to motivation to criminal behavior to a proclivity to be a professional dancer. (It’s true. More details on dancing DNA in the notes.)

We should make clear that some of the experts we talked with don’t agree with Plomin’s conclusion that confidence is
half
genetic. They say that broader personality traits—the big five, as they have become known—are accepted to be about 50 percent genetic. Those are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. But they would put attributes such as optimism and confidence, which are considered facets of the big five, in the range of 25 percent inherited. We were still surprised. Whether we get 50 percent of our confidence in our genes, or 25 percent, it’s a big chunk, more than we would have thought. (It won’t be long, we figured, before newly pregnant women will be able to take a quick fetal DNA test to determine whether they should invest in safety locks and padded walls or cuddly toys and books.)

As tantalizing and voluminous as the science is at this point, it’s hardly exact. It turns out that sifting through our 20,000 genes is slow going. Nothing resembling a complete or partial genetic personality code yet exists. Remember, in the twenty or so years since genetic research has taken off, the emphasis has been on pathology—physical and mental illnesses—rather than on the genetic building blocks of health and well-being. That’s just starting to change. Now, the equally interesting question is becoming: What do the genes of psychologically strong, healthy people look like?

Not surprisingly, intelligence is the positive attribute that has received the most attention. Researchers around the world have already uncovered at least one intelligence gene by comparing DNA and IQ scores. A young Chinese researcher, Zhao Bowen, is looking for another one, his sequencing machine on overdrive, going through DNA samples from the world’s smartest people.

Nobody has undertaken a project yet to extract DNA samples from the world’s most confident people, and none of the scientists we spoke to believe that there will be just one so-called confidence gene. As is the case with many complex personality traits, experts told us that confidence is influenced by a large number of genes, dozens or more, which create a messy stew of hormones and neural activity. Confidence involves both emotion and cognition. Indeed it has a metacognitive component, because it involves
our knowledge
about our brain at work. In other words, it’s not simply about whether we can
do
a task, but whether we
assess
ourselves to be
capable
of doing that task. Even so, scientists are drilling all around the perimeter of confidence these days, as they examine related personality attributes, such as optimism and anxiety. Their work makes it possible to piece together an early, basic formula.

Fuel for Action

Thinking about our own definition of confidence as fuel for action, we decided that the cleanest approach was simply to ask what it is, exactly, that gets one’s brain in the right frame of mind to act.