In a study a few years ago, thousands of adolescents across the OECD were asked whether they were familiar with a list of 16 mathematical concepts. The researchers smuggled three non-existent terms into the survey – one was “declarative fraction”. The students had to rate their understanding of each term. This yielded a measure of overconfidence: the authors use the term “bullsh***ing” in the title of the academic paper to describe the phenomenon of students claiming to understand mathematical terms that didn’t exist.
You may not be surprised to learn that boys spoofed more than girls, across all nine English-speaking countries in the survey. Or that wealthier children bluffed more than poorer children. Or even that adolescents from North America topped the list, while Irish and Scots were at the bottom, with England somewhere in the middle.
But here’s the confidence paradox: compared to the non-bluffers, overconfident spoofers said they would persist longer in solving difficult problems and that they were more popular in school. And they were probably right.
All over the English-speaking world, we’re seeing a rise in an unhealthy kind of confidence – an arrogance that tips into hubris. As the New York Times noted recently in a trending piece, “it used to be that ‘impostor syndrome’ dominated conversations, the anxious stance of millennials with adult responsibilities and women leading corporate workplaces trying not to rankle. Now, in an era of aggressively handsome incels and macho political posturing, cultivated humility feels trite.”
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Take this quote, attributed to manosphere influencer Andrew Tate: “Women are like cars. You can get a new one whenever you want, but you always want to keep the old one in good condition in case you need it again.” His words capture the spirit of what is being called “toxic confidence”.
At the heart of it, Tate’s philosophy is about building yourself up by knocking someone else down – the ancient practice of the domination of one group by another. Once you see another person as an “it” rather than, in the theologian Martin Buber’s terms, “thou”, then you are free to do absolutely anything to that object.
The call of Tate and other manosphere influencers to a masculine in-group to bond together against the threat of feminine domination – while simultaneously, and confusingly, asserting women’s inferiority – creates a heady sense of mission. Their promise of rediscovering men’s true place in the world offers fragile egos a drug-like soothing of anxieties and quelling of self-doubts. Because at the heart of toxic overconfidence is, of course, a deep well of uncertainty and fear.
Populists like Reform UK’s Nigel Farage, leader of the French far-right Marine Le Pen and US president Donald Trump have mastered the art using this basic biological principle to drive their political careers. They deploy their political swagger to lift the spirits, quell the anxieties and foster a feeling of superiority in millions of people who have felt left behind in liberal-democratic capitalist societies.
The toxic overconfidence of Donald Trump, inflamed by his previous military missions in Iran and Venezuela, has left the world in turmoil. It was inevitable he would overreach because toxic overconfidence kills judgment, destroys empathy and banishes appreciation of risk.
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a foundational step in human civilisation because it codified the unacceptability of treating other human beings as objects. By affirming dignity, liberty and equality of each individual it created the legal and moral basis for post second World War liberal democracy and a new “rules-based world order”.
That’s all well and good on paper – until it bumps up against human psychology. As a group species, humans are very tribal. One of the easiest ways to make us feel good is a common threat from another group that binds us together. This releases the social bonding hormone oxytocin which lifts our mood and lowers anxiety. It also leaves us feeling superior to the other group and tends to lead to us derogating them – a slippery slope towards seeing them as objects.
Tribal populists understand this at an instinctive level. They offer certainty – and that is why the confidence they offer is fake and toxic. See Donald Trump’s: “I can end it in two or three days” boast about the American-Israeli war on Iran.
But here is the paradox I mentioned earlier. Confidence – even phoney, superiority confidence – can be effective.
Healthy confidence works because the belief that you can achieve something that stretches you acts as a mini-anxiety drug, a mini antidepressant, a motivator and a cognitive enhancer. True confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy that builds on itself to create multiple mini success experiences that steadily build towards greater success.
But simply appearing confident to others makes you more persuasive and influential. Why? Because a confident demeanour leads to others giving you higher status. This is why fake confidence, the kind founded on carefully nurtured grievances and illusions of superiority, can thrive. It is why social media influencers with no professional knowledge can push pseudo-medical products – damaging skincare lotions to young teenage girls for example – and become rich as a result. It is why scientifically-ignorant, self-appointed gurus can spin ridiculous theories about vaccination and expose millions of children to disease.
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Why is there so much of this toxic overconfidence about now? A tsunami of anxiety has hit young people throughout the developed world in the 21st century. One reason for this may be isolation and over-protection of children in the real social world – combined with a pernicious feeling of failure in comparison to the “successes” of celebrities and influencers in the virtual world.
Their hyperconfident apparent achievements make their young followers yearn for some of that success, while at the same time making them doubtful and anxious about themselves – creating a vicious circle of anxiety that feeds overconfidence. The strut of toxic overconfidence becomes a cultural meme that works for a few, but damages many.
Anything that is powerful enough to do great good, must also be capable of great harm. It is true of nuclear energy. It is also true of confidence.
Ian Robertson is a neuropsychologist and author of How Confidence Works
