Confidence tricks
Can self-belief actually threaten the health of our society? Rowland Manthorpe analyses the effects of confidence – too much or too little of it – on the national psyche
Earlier this year, NatWest surveyed 9,000 young people about their salary expectations. The gloomy economic forecasts seem to have influenced the respondents, because their expected average earnings fell from last year’s estimate. Instead of saying they would be earning £70,000 by the time they were 35, they modestly anticipated £54,000. It is a startling display of confidence. The average salary for a 35-year-old is £23,893.
The respondents are backing themselves to overcome not only the law of averages, but also the economic conditions. Instead of having, as predicted, both a car and a house by age 25, it looks as if young people will be struggling to find work. Ironically, in this future, confidence will be at a premium. No one knows the consuming quicksand of self-doubt as well as the unemployed.
We see confidence as a virtue, something we want our children to have. Yet we also worry that the promotion of self-confidence has led to unrealistic expectations. It is hard to watch Britain’s Got Talent or The X Factor without thinking that the idea that ‘you can be whatever you want to be, as long as you believe in yourself’ has had a damaging effect on the national psyche.
If one event ought to have changed attitudes towards confidence, it is the financial crisis. Much of the responsibility for the credit crunch can be laid at the door of excessive self-belief. We can see this on an individual level, in the bankers and financiers who broke the system. Their MBA-inspired confidence was augmented by financial models that claimed to make failure impossible. It is also true more generally. As a society, we were confident enough to pile more than a billion pounds of debt onto our credit cards. We had faith in the future.
This is a dangerous attitude, as our recent experience makes clear. In the run-up to the credit crunch, bankers’ and regulators’ optimistic sense that things would work out for the best blinded them to the possibility of failure. They had faith in their power to control the future. It was an attitude that inevitably fostered overreach.
Confidence leads to overconfidence, as recent events have demonstrated. Yet we show few signs of trying to wean ourselves off it. The remedy for our crisis of confidence – a crisis caused by an excess of confidence – is to be more confident. This is the message economically. It is also a truism of aid to the unemployed.
Nowhere has the promotion of confidence been taken up more eagerly than in education. Assertiveness training and even therapy are now available in schools, all part of the great project to endow children with confidence. But to what end? US psychologist Angela Duckworth has criticised the systematic attempt to improve self-esteem in children. "Self-esteem has gone up in the United States,” she says. “Achievement has not. If anything, compared with other countries, we have done worse, but our kids feel really good about themselves."
And how long will that feeling last? Misplaced confidence could lead to crushing lows, according to Randolph Nesse, a researcher in evolutionary medicine at the University of Michigan. Nesse argues that the feeling of despondency is an inbuilt reaction to the pursuit of damaging mental courses of action, just as pain is to the pursuit of harmful physical ones. It prevents us from chasing after the sort of unreachable goals – such as £50,000 salaries in declining economies – that will bring about despair.
So confidence unchecked may lead to depression, yet you’re sunk without self-belief – as the unemployed know only too well. This is the catch-22 of confidence and the tragedy of the respondents to the NatWest survey. Their inflated goals are a product of the need for self-belief.
Confidence is faith in progress. It is the go-getting optimism that drives our capitalist system. Its ups and downs, its booms and busts, may be the price we pay for our dynamic way of life. Unless there is a deep-rooted transformation in our economy and society, confidence will remain critical, and this crash will not be our last.
Rowland Manthorpe is a freelance writer and critic. His first book, Confidence, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2010
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