Confidence
[3][4] Confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those without it may fail because they lack it, and those with it may succeed because they have it rather than because of an innate ability or skill.
Ideas about the causes and effects of self-confidence have appeared in English-language publications describing characteristics of a sacrilegious attitude toward God,[5] the character of the British empire,[6] and the culture of colonial-era American society.
[full citation needed] With World War I, psychologists praised self-confidence as greatly decreasing nervous tension, allaying fear, and ridding the battlefield of terror; they argued that soldiers who cultivated a strong and healthy body would also acquire greater self-confidence while fighting.
[8] At the height of the temperance movement of the 1920s, psychologists associated self-confidence in men with remaining at home and taking care of the family when they were not working.
[9] During the Great Depression, academics Philip Eisenberg and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote that a sudden negative change in one's circumstances, especially a loss of a job, could lead to decreased self-confidence, but more commonly if the jobless person believes the fault of his unemployment is his.
[11] As material standards of most people rapidly rose in developed countries after World War II and fulfilled their material needs, a plethora of widely cited academic research about confidence and related concepts like self-esteem and self-efficacy emerged.
[15] Some methods measure self-esteem and self-confidence in various aspects or activities, such as speaking in public spaces, academic performance, physical appearance, romantic relationships, social interactions, and athletic ability.
[16][17] In sports, researchers have measured athletes' confidence about winning upcoming matches[18] and how sensitive respondents' self-confidence is to performance and negative feedback.
The term "self-confidence" typically refers to a general personality trait— in contrast, "self-efficacy" is defined by psychologist Albert Bandura as a "belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task".
[26] Social psychologists have found self-confidence to be correlated with other psychological variables including saving money,[27] influencing others,[28] and being a responsible student.
[31] Marketing researchers have found that the general self-confidence of a person is negatively correlated with their level of anxiety.
This can be the case after a stroke, when the patient refrains from using a weaker lower limb due to fear of it not being strong enough.
[43] On the overconfidence effect, Martin Hilbert argues that confidence bias can be explained by a noisy conversion of objective evidence into subjective estimates, where noise is defined as the mixing of memories during the observing and remembering process.
In the extreme, large differences between one's self-perception and one's actual behaviour are a hallmark of several disorders that have important implications for understanding treatment-seeking and compliance.
[48] Whether a person, in making a decision, seeks out additional sources of information depends on their level of self-confidence specific to that area.
[50] If new information about an individual's performance is negative feedback, this may interact with a negative affective state (low self-confidence) causing the individual to become demoralized, which in turn induces a self-defeating attitude that increases the likelihood of failure in the future more than if they did not lack self-confidence.
[57] However, expert psychological testimony on the factors that influence eyewitness memory appears to reduce juror reliance on self-confidence.
[59] Others suggest that self-confidence does not affect leadership style but is only correlated with years of supervisory experience and self-perceptions of power.
[13] If children are self-confident, they may be more likely to sacrifice immediate recreational time for possible rewards in the future, enhancing their self-regulatory capability.
[63]In general, students who perform well have increased confidence, which likely in turn encourages them to take greater responsibility to complete tasks.
[70] The opposite has been observed in Asian Americans, whose confidence becomes tied up in expectations that they will succeed by both parents and teachers and who claim others perceive them as excelling academically more than they are.
[78] Male common stock investors trade 45% more than their female counterparts, which they attribute to greater recklessness (though also self-confidence) of men, reducing men's net returns by 2.65 percentage points per year versus women's 1.72 percentage points.
[84] In particular, "robust self-confidence beliefs" are correlated with aspects of mental toughness—the ability to cope better than one's opponents and remain focused under pressure.
