Confidence bias

I’m a little taken aback by how well it works and how prevalent it is in America. If you say anything and say it with enough confidence that you yourself believe it, you’ll be able to sway and convince a surprising number of people. It’s the one “key trait” that leadership teams look for and the one trait that ends up being the reason for so many promotions up the corporate ladder. I’m getting surprisingly good at faking it and that worries me a bit.

In college and throughout most of school, I was taught to be skeptical. Inquisitive. Curious. If something worked a certain way, think about all the alternative ways it could work. Consider the reasons why it works the way it does and the implications of changing that method. I was taught to think before I speak, to listen before I talk, and to rehearse before I present.

Enter the working world. You can pretty much throw the entirety of the last paragraph out the window. Because in America, a country where the roaring twenties’ notion of “success” came from good salesmanship and advertising campaigns, the ones who speak up first and loud are usually rewarded over the ones weighing alternatives or considering other options in their heads. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the latter; they’re just being careful and want to make sure that they’re about to either do or say the thing that they most believe to be true.

There are many bright engineers, inventors, designers, and ideators in the United States. But very very few know how to sell their ideas. Many can even talk about their ideas convincingly enough that a majority of the population understands them. But again, even fewer can make you want to take out your wallet and hand over your money (Steve Jobs was most definitely in this bucket).

Confidence. That’s the secret to selling your ideas. In services like ideation and design, there’s no objective “truth” to the process of doing something. Everything is roughly based on a tried-and-true model which leads to certain unknown results. Selling someone on this kind of process is like a fisherman explaining his method for catching small cod while using it as a basis to convince someone that he’ll be able to catch a shark by doing the same thing.

All the fisherman has to do is sound confident. Talk about the choppy waves, the rough waters, the dangers of his boat capsizing in these conditions, his familiarity with the seasonal weather forecasts, his certainty of the locations where he’s previously seen sharks linger, his plan for baiting the shark based on his knowledge of other marine creatures, and he can go on and on like this forever. If the fisherman says all this with a confident tone and a reassuring manner, sooner or later, the person listening to all this will convince themselves that there’s no better person on the planet to catch this shark than this fisherman right here.

And bam! Just like that, the fisherman is hired to catch the shark. He may have slipped in a clause in the contract about the unreliability of guaranteeing a catch, but now that he’s on such good terms with the person who hired him to catch the shark, it’s basically like he’s doing a friend a favor. Even if he doesn’t catch the shark, the man who hired him will likely just shrug it off, citing that the “shark catching expert” did his very best and other conditions just weren’t in his favor that day.

This is how I like to picture most of American business history went down. There must have been so many people “right for the job” but those people just didn’t know the secret to get ahead in this country. Those who knew this secret confidence strategy either had a personality that naturally favored it or were observant enough to pick it up (after which they must have felt like psychological manipulators putting it into practice and watching all the cash flow in).

Even though there must have been at least ten other people on that island who knew more about sharks or catching sharks than that one fisherman, that one fisherman still got the job. He didn’t need to know a damn thing about sharks. All he needed to know was how all of his other knowledge and experience would help him sell his skills on catching sharks to the man who wanted him to do so. This is the power of confidence and the power of salesmanship.

I mentioned I’m getting good at it. I’ve started to convince people that I’m completely capable of doing things that I most definitely am not. I know that there’s other people who most definitely are, and that causes this weird mental conflict in my head about whether I’m really the right person for the job. Even when the job is done, I keep wondering how differently it would’ve turned out if the “right person” had done it. I’m the fisherman with a selfless dilemma.

A part of me wants to go and yell out to the world that the secret is confidence (maybe this blog post will help, who knows). I obviously want to see the best possible outcome for any project or product out there, so I definitely want the right people doing the work that they’re best matched for. But at the same time, most businesses are basically fighting amongst themselves to convince clients that they’re the best company for the job, claiming that they’re so good at solving a problem they’ve never solved before by citing all the other unrelated but somewhat similar things they’ve done in the past.

We, as human beings, are simply more likely to trust someone who seems like they know exactly what they’re talking about. We immediately turn on our inner skeptic when someone utters the words “maybe” or “possibly” in a sentence. We need to know that the person who is going to do the thing we want them to do is actually capable of doing it. And we like to rely on our woefully controversial evolutionary senses to help us out. We favor the tall, the handsome, and the confident, indirectly contributing to the artificial selection that eventually leads to problems in workplace diversity and the like. We are enamored by someone telling us a story of how they’re going to solve our problem (even if they’re totally bullshitting), because we’re hard-wired to crave good stories and great storytellers (especially when it ends in our problem being solved).

Ultimately, we ourselves caused us to be in the situation that we’re in. Maybe if there were seven different realities with the same human traits as the seeds, psychosocial dynamics and human interaction mechanisms would still lead us to this place in all seven realities. The good news is that we can certainly reverse the effects by starting to recognize confidence bias when it’s happening. The next time someone tries to tell you how they’re going to solve your problem, look straight into their eyes and try to peer into their mind (or soul, if you’re into that). Do they really know how to solve your problem? Or are they just trying to get you to say yes? Are they really the right person for the job? If you catch yourself responding differently to these questions than you did before, you may have just untethered yourself from the grips of confidence bias — one of the longest-lasting psychological tricks that America has been using since the 1920s that even works today in commercials and mainstream advertising. Congrats!

If you read all the way to here, did I just successfully convince you that confidence bias is a thing? I don’t know. You tell me. This is a test.