Talking about confidence

[chrisvenus]

I read something that suggested that finding out more about confidence from the point of view of others was helpful to building your own self-confidence. So here we go. I am at times very un-confident in myself so I am going to ask a few questions to get people going on the subject. If you want to add in more comments or questions then feel free. I have a vague feeling I did something similar before but now I'm copying from a book so it will be much better. Anonymous posting welcome if you don't want to put your name to your answers. :)

1) What do you think confidence is?

2) Where does confidence come from?

3) Can you think of someone who is completely confident?

4) How can you tell if someone is confident or not?

5) How do you feel when you talk to someone who is not at all confident?

6) Does a confident person always feel confident?

and my own one for number 7:

7) What is the difference between being confident and acting confident?


I will try to put up my own answers later but I don't have time right now.

Comments

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

4) How can you tell if someone is confident or not?

Someone who is hesitant, indecisive, or who keeps changing their mind is obviously thinking quite hard about what they're doing and is probably unsure of the correct approach. So while they might in the end come up with the right answer, they clearly aren't confident of it yet. Still, they might be confident of and comfortable with the fact that they have no confidence in their answer :-)

In social situations, someone who speaks willingly, and follows up on what they say, is confident that nothing too bad is going to happen as a result of that interaction. Someone who doesn't do those things is cautious or afraid of the situation.

Generally, if someone is willing to accept a penalty if they're wrong, then they're at least somewhat confident. But as cardinalsin very rightly says, bluffing does affect this.

5) How do you feel when you talk to someone who is not at all confident?

Depends what's at stake. When it's a matter of their confidence in something I want, or am planning to rely on, then perhaps frustrated at their inability to help me. Even angry, if I feel that they have a responsibility to be confident. "I can't say whether it'll be morning or afternoon" is a notorious case.

If it's that they're "not confident" socially in the sense of "shy", then usually I figure that I need to let them get to a topic or style of interaction that they're comfortable with, so I suppose I'm trying to feel sympathy.

6) Does a confident person always feel confident?

Confidence is both a state of knowledge and an emotion so I'd say no, it's inherently variable. A "happy person" doesn't always feel happy. But generally there are kinds of situation in which particular people are confident, and they can always feel confident in those. So you might have someone who is, for example, always confident he won't make a fool of himself chatting someone up in a bar.

7) What is the difference between being confident and acting confident?

Holding a royal flush is being confident. Going all in is acting confident.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Interesting perspective.

Holding a royal flush is being confident. Going all in is acting confident.

Holding a royal flush is being lucky. It may result in you having a *feeling* of confidence, but that's not the same thing. And it can have no impact on confidence-in-the-sense-of-personality-trait. Eurch, so much imprecise language affecting this topic: 'confidence' means too many different things.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

What I meant is that if you hold a royal flush then you are risking nothing on the hand. You will win (or at worst, I guess, share the pot). That's as confident as it's possible to be, objectively. Consequently, I think most people would also feel pretty confident playing with a royal flush.

Thinking about it more, you can of course blow a royal flush - you can appear too confident and scare everyone off. So there are still things to be insecure about in that situation. But there's absolutely nothing to lose by playing.

I wasn't considering how I'd got the royal flush in the first place. If I were to think to myself, "gosh, I know I have this royal flush, but can such amazing luck hold to the end of the hand?", then I'd describe that as an irrational effect undermining my confidence. Such irrational fears seem absurd when applied to a mathematical certainty like poker, but are quite common in real life. I think that confidence-as-a-personality-trait is the sum of such things, since generally it manifests as failing to feel confident in a situation where in fact the risks are non-existent or manageable.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

I mean lack-of-confidence-as-a-personality-trait.

Confidence-as-a-personality-trait is not being undermined by unreasonable concerns. Over-confidence-as-a-personality-trait is the reverse of lack-of-confidence-as-a-personality-trait.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

I suppose what I was getting at is that the way you were attributing the adjective 'confident' to the situation, not to the person. For example, you say: "You will win ... That's as confident as it's possible to be, objectively." and are thus making 'confident' something which is determined by the circumstances, a quality which belongs to the circumstances, not to the person. That's not the usual use of the word. 'Confident' is usually used to apply to a person. I don't think confidence can be comfortably applied 'objectively' - it's not about the facts, but about how a person feels about themselves (sometimes with particular reference to a certain situation, sometimes as a whole). Even when someone says 'I feel confident I will win because I have a royal flush' what they are describing with the word is not the situation, but how they feel at that moment - they feel confident of victory. That's *because* of their good hand, but it doesn't follow that it's a confident hand, or a confident situation.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Fair comments, and I agree that I have conflated two things. Having a royal flush is (assuming a little elementary deduction) an inherently confidence-inspiring situation. So I tried to use it to illustrate confidence: that which is associated such a situation. A royal flush is not itself confidence.

I suppose I should not have said: "You will win. That's as confident as it is possible to be", but "You will win. This will, I imagine, assuming that you know poker and think rationally, make you as confident as it is possible to be".

To be honest, I wasn't trying to define confidence using this example, since that already was question 1. I was more trying to illustrate how acting confident is different.

I don't think that the word "feeling" is necessary, although of course it commonly is used. I don't think "I feel confident" is any different from "I have confidence", and both are a risk-moderated version of "I have knowledge". There aren't "knowledgeable situations" in poker either, but if asked to illustrate knowledge I might say that "looking at your cards is knowledge". If you see what I mean.

To get back to your first comment on my post, I suppose I'd say the difference between confidence and the-personality-trait-confidence is that people with the-personality-trait-confidence are more able/likely to be confident about (positive) things. It's a lot like the difference between being happy right now, and being a happy person in general, and it's a natural correspondence.

I say "(positive) things", because it has just occurred to me that extreme pessimists are generally not described as being "confident", whereas by my definitions so far, they could be considered very confident, of a negative outcome. So there's another subjectivity there, which my definition should note, that having absolute belief in a negative outcome is considered "zero confidence" rather than "100% confidence". But even then it's fair to say that you're absolutely confident of your prediction.

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

I don't think "I feel confident" is any different from "I have confidence", and both are a risk-moderated version of "I have knowledge".

This makes me think that you must be a hyperrational person. I would say that confidence is a long way from a risk-moderated version of "I have knowledge". I rarely feel confident, despite generally having good odds, and the degree to which I feel confident rarely bears much relation to the odds that I would attribute to a situation. Your sense of confidence, I assume, must correlate much more closely with your rationally attributed odds than mine does.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Not as much as you might think. Like I say, I think that the irrational fear causes the unjustified lack of confidence: I'm not so rational that my emotions have no effect at all on my beliefs.

I think what you're describing is what I said early on: "one can be over-confident or under-confident either because of bad information or irrational effects". I should add that it's possible to hold conflicting beliefs: one rational and another under the influence of fear, panic, or whatever else is going on.

In that case I think you can honestly say that you're confident of success, you expect it, you predict it, and so on. You can simultaneously feel that there's no chance, or feel non-specific dread, and not be confident at all. I'd say that's conflicting beliefs, rather than two different things only one of which is really "confidence". I guess (contrary to what I said before) one could be described as "having confidence" and the other as "feeling it".

If that doesn't correspond with your experience, then I'm not saying that you're "really" confident even though you feel that you aren't. Just that I don't think of the feeling itself as being 'confidencelessness', but as a fear which inhibits confidence. It's also possible for an assessment of low risk to inhibit fear (unless that's a hyperrational trait too...).

I think it's the same as the way that a prejudice can interfere with someone's ability to form rational beliefs based on their observations. It's pretty rare for someone to acknowledge a prejudice and still maintain it for long, but when it happens I think you probably get the same situation where you "know" something, but don't "feel it to be true".

[floralaetifica.livejournal.com]

Another demonstration that confidence is to do with the person not the circumstances is that confidence can be justified or unjustified. Someone's confidence is not determined by their actual success or probable success, it's just an emotion or attitude associated with their success-as-they-perceive-it.

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Yes, as with knowledge and belief. A person's knowledge is not determined by actual facts, just facts-as-they-perceive-them.

The differences are that people have very strong intuition and emotion around risk, and that risk is not directly observable. So unjustified confidence levels (high or low) about easily measurable things are even more common and understandable than unjustified belief about easily measurable things. "Knowledge" is a prejudiced term in this respect: there's not really any such thing as "unjustified knowledge".

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Holding a royal flush is being lucky.

Once I've got it, though, *lucky* is if someone else has a straight flush to King.