Confidence: What Does It Do? | Richard Petty | TEDxOhioStateUniversity

hello everyone who would like to be more confident great I need a little dose myself right now as it turns out but fellow confidence seekers we are not alone if you go to any bookstore this is from amazon.com you can learn how to get the ultimate self confidence unstoppable confidence instant confidence and if you're a dummy there's a book for you - confidence for dummies we see confidence everywhere in our society the government tracks consumer confidence I was shopping at Best Buy the other day they wanted me to buy with confidence at Target they want me to shop with confidence on my way into work I was behind this truck how else can you shred but with confidence any biologists out there if you're working in your lab don't you want to clone with confidence just that this is real I'm not making I'm not making these up when you go home what do you want to do well you want to carve that Turkey with confidence that's the main thing a little dressing on the side maybe I'm a faculty member at Ohio State how do they want me to retire with confidence of course and then when my life is over how am I going to go out with with confidence so we're not alone confident seekers everyone assumes we we want this first what is confidence let's differentiate it first from what it's often confused with and that is self-esteem we all know what self-esteem is right that's how much you like yourself what do you think of yourself are you a good person are you wonderful confidence is how sure you are of that judgment right so you can be you can say I'm a great person and I ask you are you sure you go I'm not that sure and I can ask a person you know what do you think of yourself like I'm pretty miserable I'm not very smart and I go are you sure yeah I'm totally sure so confidence and self-esteem are not the same thing at all you can be highly confident or doubtful in both a good or bad assessment of yourself and every other opinion that you have in life okay so we know the difference between those two things why do people care about confidence they think it's associated with success right we will all want to be successful so we all want to be more confident get that better job get the raise is there a relationship there's relatively little research on this actually so but there are lots of anecdotes so you know about this little football game that took place a few weeks ago when our wonderful coach Urban Meyer was asked how the team did it you know what he said and what all the newspaper said they did it with confidence that that's how just the same way we shop and carve and and do everything else in life and there's got to be some truth to that right if there's somebody down the field and you want to throw it you want to throw with confidence but does it really relate to success is there more than anecdotes so my colleagues and I along with the authors of the confidence code came up with a survey to assess people's confidence psychological battery and then we asked them a bunch of questions about their own lives how successful they were what kinds of education they attained what jobs they had how much income they had we've now had 150,000 people complete the survey so there's a lot of people interested in confidence you can go on and go to the website fill it out yourself but here's the relationship between confidence and income that we found across the United States we've graphed I don't even need to tell you what the graph is as the line goes up what it is as confidence goes up so does your income right the question for us is does confidence cause us to be successful or maybe you're thinking the successful people became more confident because they were making so much money right and in any correlational study we can't tease those apart so what I want to tell you about is the research we've been doing in our lab here at Ohio State about manipulating confidence making some people feel confident in the moment some people feel doubtful and then seeing what it HAP happened so it's it's like I assigned everybody in the even rows to be confident and everybody me odd rows to be doubtful and then we watch and see what they do so in the studies I'm going to tell you about in broad brush strokes because I don't have that much time first we're going to have everyone think either positive or negative thoughts and I'll explain what we do that in just a second so everyone's going to think positive or negative thoughts in some studies that's about themselves how good they are how bad they are other studies it's about somebody else and then we're going to manipulate confidence in a certain way and what our theory of confidence is it's called the self validation theory and what the theory basically says it confidence serves as a magnifier of our thoughts so we all have thoughts and feelings as we go about the day but some people trust their thoughts and use them so some people think they're a good employee but they don't translate it into the judgment hey I deserve a raise and some people have the thought that I deserve a raise but they don't translate it into the action of actually asking their boss for a raise that's what we think confidence does it magnifies the thoughts and the feelings that we have so in the studies we're going to manipulate how confident you are and what your thoughts are so if you were in one of our studies what we did maybe you can play along with me for a moment think some positive thoughts about yourself like I'm attractive I'm intelligent I'm a good person but while you're thinking those nod your head up and down I am attractive oh boy I am attractive I am intelligent and if you're like most people if you're saying it while you're nodding you are feeling this is true right you feel that you can try it at home to people who are watching now try the same thing and move your head side to side I'm smart I'm intelligent I'm attractive you're invalidating the thoughts as you're having them so the point of this is to say it isn't just having thoughts that's critical it's how we feel about our thoughts are we confident or not in them so that's one study that we did another one you can sit up straight in your chair same effect you sit up straight or stand up straight you start to feel confident and you go I am smart oh yeah I am smart I am intelligent if you slump over and have the same thoughts I'm smart intelligent doesn't work first study we had people sitting big tall executive chairs or little tiny chairs and so they feel powerful and confident and so forth last one we had people write thoughts with their dominant hand sometimes I'm lazy so this person wrote with their dominant hand so they would believe it this person wrote with their non-dominant hand you just can't believe that can get me you thought it but you just it's just like shaking your head or saying it when you slumped over so that's the theory is that doesn't matter only what you think but it matters what you think about what you think so for the moment look at the middle of that graph up on the screen the middle of the graph these are results summarized across a whole bunch of studies that we've done using a bunch of different manipulations and measures but the results in these studies are the same the control group is the group that just had the positive or negative thoughts and they weren't shaking or not in your heads they were just having it normal they weren't sitting a record they were just sitting normal that's the normal thing that would happen and if you think positive thoughts about yourself or someone else you're what's graphed is the judgement your judgment will be more positive right than if you had negative thoughts no big surprise but look what happens when people had those very same positive and negative thoughts when they were nodding their heads or when they were sitting up straight all of a sudden they think they're a better person or they think the other person that they were thinking about is better when they were confident not in their heads or if they were thinking negative thoughts now they think the person is much worse so right there you can see confidence that magnification effect people who are shaking their heads from side to side or slipping over that's the doubtful condition they had the thoughts they're not really using them so the effective thoughts is being attenuated okay now what can we explain with our theory of confidence you're familiar with politicians once in a while they do something and they get themselves into trouble why why do powerful people get into trouble seems so frequently one theory is powerful people just have more resources and so they can buy their way into trouble or you know buy drugs Mayor of Toronto another is maybe powerful people when you get to be powerful you just have more corrupting thoughts so power makes you think bad things and there may be some something to both of those but in our research what we try to do is to hold both of those constant so we had high and low powerful people because they're playing the role of a boss or an employee but they're sitting in a big powerful or not so their access to real resources is the same we make them think exactly the same thoughts and what happens the powerful people use their thoughts they act on their thoughts both for good and for bad and so I think one explanation for this happening is not always that they have more bad thoughts but they're more willing to act on them another thing one can explain with this is why there's so many negative ads in Ohio we see tons of negative ads and it's almost as if they want you to be against the other person rather than for your person what our research shows is that there's something to this and that's that when we feel like we're against something we have to stop something we feel more confident in our position than if we feel like we're for something so if you say I'm for equality that's good good to be for equality but if you're against discrimination that's what's going to send you to the streets and and to protest so in a study what we did is we call people on the phone during an actual election and we just asked them a simple question one of two questions who do you oppose in this election and then you'd say Hugo Post or who do you favor in this election and they'd say who they favored so just made salient who they were for or who they were against and then we asked them do you intend to vote will you give money to your candidate the people who thought of themselves as an opposer in the election were more likely to say they would vote give money so forth again they're translating their position into action ok let's summarize three big conclusions you now know that confidence is not the same as self-esteem some of those books on confidence are really all about self-esteem they're not about a confidence very much confused we know confidence can come from many places if you practice a lot of course you'll be more confident in a skill but it can come from standing up straight or nodding your head so you can momentarily make yourself more confident and finally and this is maybe the most important thing confidence can magnify both the good and the bad and so earlier today we heard a talk about suicide and so someone has really negative thoughts about themselves the last thing you want them to do is to become more confident because they will be very confident in those negative thoughts about themselves so finally I'd like to thank my collaborators on this research and I'd like to thank you the audience for your attention

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 81,614

Keywords: ted, Social Science, tedx talks, ted talk, ted x, TEDxTalks, tedx talk, Psychology, United States, tedx, ted talks, English

Id: cKu-32iyHs0

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 16 2015