Confidence Is Just a Feeling
It's important to understand what causes confidence in order to know when to trust it.
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Confidence Is Just a Feeling
Confidence is trait that’s appealing to all of us. There’s lots of research out there that both men and women rank confidence as a very attractive trait in a potential partner. The reason why this is the case is still up for debate, but it’s likely because so many other traits that are actually important (like competence, drive, and kindness) are typically hard to evaluate initially, so we substitute confidence as a temporary surrogate.
This post isn’t about getting you single folks more dates though. It’s a warning about this bias and how it affects businesses and teams. Here’s the critical quote from Danny Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow:
Subjective confidence in a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that this judgment is correct. Confidence is a feeling, which reflects the coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.
It might help to reread that to make sure you’re taking it all in; there’s a lot there.
Looking at the first sentence, “subjective” is the key word. Confidence isn’t an objective value; it’s simply a subjective feeling. In the business world, we tend to ask questions like: “how confident are you in winning this deal?” “how confident are we that we’ll launch on time?” “how confident are we in this competitive intelligence?” And on and on. You’ve probably said or heard something like this within the past few weeks. That’s how much we use “confidence” as a stand in for more objective measurements.
And since this is the case, it’s important to understand what confidence actually is. Kahneman’s quote above explains it (and loaned me the title of this post). Confidence is the “coherence of the information and the cognitive ease of processing it.” But what does that exactly mean? In simpler terms, coherence is whether or not there are logical connections or consistency between data points. And cognitive ease is all about how simple it is for you to draw those connections. Putting it all together, confidence is nothing more than how easily we can create connections in our mind that make sense. The better story we can tell ourselves, the more confident we are.
People are dangerously good at this sort of thing. When given a set of information, we quickly go to work trying to find connections even amongst completely unrelated bits of data. That’s how our brain is wired and often this is a valuable trait. It’s the type of thinking that leads to advances in science and other innovations. But it can also lead us to creating connections where none actually exist.
Despite the subjectivity of confidence, we still use it a lot business. We even substitute it into calculations that are meant to be objective. In software product development, for example, many companies use RICE (reach, impact, confidence, effort) to prioritize which projects or features get developed next. Three of those (R, I, E) are fairly objective and measurable. The C isn’t, but it becomes part of a score that's meant to be objective.
Some confidence is important. You don’t want your CEO to constantly be expressing doubt. You need her to be realistic, but also to instill some confidence in the team. And that’s fine. My point here is just to be careful with how much stock you put into confidence without some other objective information.
Given that confidence is such a valued trait in business, there is another important thing to keep in mind and that’s the opposite of confidence. When someone comes to you expressing a great deal of uncertainty about a project or idea, you’d be smart to pay attention to this. It’s very rare that people come forward with uncertainty (especially if they generally are confident about most other things).
Uncertainty is not rewarded like confidence. So, if someone does express uncertainty, you should take this very seriously and understand exactly what’s happening. Uncertainty happens when you can’t put together a coherent story in your mind, which is rare since our default is to connect everything together. That should be a red flag that something isn’t right.
Confidence can be a very valuable trait in both a life and business partner, but it’s very important to keep in mind that it’s a completely subjective feeling and nothing more. Be skeptical about confidence and pay attention to uncertainty.
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