Re:Biological origins of confidence

Hi Leigh,

Looking for "anything new" is mutually exclusive with looking for "anything reliable" because science doesn't work primarily by the genius of journal editors in filtering good from bad research but by the way researchers build on each others' work over time.

It sounds like what you're looking for is probably current consensus on the development and expression of stable traits, particularly confidence, and what might be known about how they relate to success. That being the case, here are my thoughts.

There are all sorts of models (and as many opinions as "experts") of personality and how different qualities relate to success. Some of them are likely to have a lot of truth to them, there are a lot of bright people who write about this, but who knows which ones get it right ?

We can't evaluate conflicting research without the test of time and growing consensus,and much of this is opinion rather than research. I know I've read a lot of those self-help and biographical books on what makes people succeed, and some of them are really inspiring and interesting, but I take most of it with a grain of salt after the novelty of the author's excitement wears off.

Understand first that from a scientific perspective, explaining something in biological terms doesn't neccessarily make it more sound than explaining it in behavioral, developmental, or even social terms. If there is a good reason to think that "pop" psychological accounts are rather superficial (and I agree that they usually are), I think it is that such accounts offer isolated trends rather than time-tested consensus integrated with wider observations from other fields. I don't think the concept of self-esteem is useless or completely superficial, but I do think it is a limited explanation and often overemphasized as a solution to social ills.

So to the question of confidence and my thoughts on it, with that disclaimer.

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First is the personality development question, or in general "where do individual differences in confidence come from ?"
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Making the assumption that when someone says that their confidence was the key to their success, they mean a stable personality trait (rather than just an inner sense that appears somehow only in certain critical situations), the personality data are relevant.

On average, about 50% of the variance across stable personality measures are explained by heredity, based on the methods used in behavior genetics, and the other half are what is known as "nonshared environment."

The influence of experiences that children share are consistently found to be a minimal influence on their personality, one of the most surprising things about behavior genetic data. Another surprise is that the influence of heredity on our personality actually increases over our lifespan rather than decreasing as we develop. Identical twins raised apart become more like each other over time, rather than differentiating more. Adopted children never seem to correlate more than .10 (a tiny correlation) with the personality of their foster parents, a frequently frustrating learning experience for foster parents who hope to mold their children to have their (the foster parents') own good qualities rather than bringing out the child's own strengths.

What does the "nonshared environment" consist of ? As we develop, we are exposed to an increasingly wide range of experiences and we also shape the world around us to some degree for our own preferences. As this happens, some aspects of personality develop further, and others don't. More of the world of their experience ends up being unique to the individual than shared even with the family they grow up with. Leading theories of nonshared environment are birth order effects (though that requires powerful statistical tools to reliably perceive), peer group socialization, differential treatment by parents and siblings, and the construction of individually tailored environmental "microniches."

One pair of personality researchers identified the following factors they claim were correlated with personality development, other than genetics (in no particular order). Most if not all of these these are probably fairly obvious, though the affect that each has for a particular person isn't so obvious, especially when you consider that to be consistent with the other data, these things must be part of the "nonshared" experiences of children raised together:

1. quality and quantity of language exposed to
2. amount of play
3. expressed affection
4. availability of toys
5. presence of parents
6. presence of other children
7. family expression of emotion
8. intellectual pursuits and expectations
9. control, limits, and discipline

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Second, confidence as a personality trait ...
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Personality theory is problematic because people act differently in different situations. However, there appear to be stable traits that we can measure that give us valid and reliable estimates of how people respond across a range of situations where the relevant behaviors are invited, and these roughly correlate with what we think of when we speak of someone's personality.

The recent consensus among most personality scholars is based on a mathematical technique called factor analysis,which takes the answers to questions and analyzes them for common factors to see how they cluster. The best known factor analysis produced five factors, known as the "Big Five" model:

1. Resilience (experience with negative emotion: reactive to responsive to sedate)

2. Extraversion (preference for active involvement with other people: extravert to ambivalent to introvert)

3. Openness (curious about inner and outer worlds: explorer to preserver)

4. Agreeableness (degree of altruism vs. egocentricism: adapter to negotiator to challenger)

5. Conscientiousness (self-control in service of will to succeed: from focused to balanced to flexible)

The lifespan effect over time is that we tend to move closer to the leanings of our genetic heritage, and in general we become more goal-oriented, easier to get along with, less outwardly sociable, more emotionally stable, and a little more conservative.

There are rough correlations of each of these traits with success in particular kinds of jobs.

Successful air traffic controllers and military snipers tend to be on the sedate rather than reactive end of the resilience scale.

Successful politicians and salespeople are more often than not extraverts.

Exceptional financial and project managers tend to be preservers rather than explorers on the openness scale, while entrepreneurs and scientists tend to be closer to the explorer end (probably to the surprise of people who think of scientists as "conservative" because science itself is a conservative institution).

Teachers and clinical psychologists and social workers are very often adapters on the agreeableness scale, while exceptional advertising executives, managers, and military leaders tend to be on the challenger end of that scale.

The focused end of the conscientiousness scale has leaders, executives, and "high achievers" in general, people who are highly driven to succeed and often do. At the flexible end are people who thrive more as researchers, consultants, and detectives rather than leaders.

The most obvious correlation for high success women would be the focused trait. Men and women do not differ significantly in this personality dimension on average. In fact, the only one of the Big Five dimensions in which men and women tend to vary is resilience, and it isn't known how much of that difference is because of differences in the way our brains regulate negative emotions and how much is because of differences in reporting them. As a group, women tend to be more outwardly reactive to situations, something that is sometimes an asset and sometimes a liability.

The fact that there is a fairly negligible difference in the stable dimension of conscientiousness, and it seems relatively important to the success motivation of high achievers, seems to lend support to the notion that the relative rarity of female high achievers in positions of leadership is not a matter of biological gender difference in ability.

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Third, where does confidence in particular come from ?
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Very soon after birth, a native temperament becomes clear. In general, developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan points out that infants tend to fall right away into some relatively stable point on a continuum of more or less inhibited, and it seems very likely that this is a biological setting, largely the result of heredity, and its mechanisms have begun to be elucidated in brain research.

This obviously relates to introversion. The inhibited temperament and introversion appear to have a remarkable influence on the course of our lives through their influence on the way we relate to other people, and also has a tremendous effect on how we think in general.

However, surprisingly, the relationship of early temperament to the other four of the "Big Five" personality dimensions, including conscientiousness,the one that seems most related to confidence, is much less clear.

It is becoming better understood how our biology affects things like novelty seeking and inhibition, and to a lesser degree, reactivity, but it is less clear so far the specifics of other personality dimensions like consientiousness.

Closing thoughts ...

It would seem at first that social confidence in the form of extraversion should have a clearer correlation with social effectiveness.

Extroverts have the most motivation for money, status, and power, but ironically they aren't neccessarily the best at building effective groups or keeping a group on track.

Introverts (those introverts who are also complexity-seekers) tend to be more willing to dive into difficult problems, calm their own emotions, think abstractly, come up with unusual solutions, and paradoxically even to enlist the help of potentially useful strangers.

Surprisingly, they are also more likely to use both their intellect and their emotions in solving a problem. The web of emotional connectivity in the brain called the striatum tends to light up more in introverts than extraverts when they think about a tough problem, as well as the cortex in general and especially the frontal lobes. Most importantly, they tend to be slower, steadier, and more persistent, rather than following shifting novel diversions and making random mistakes. So they frequently compensate for their lack of social interest and lack of relatively less motivation for money, status, and power, with an ability to construct something more lasting.

So the demands of leadership don't seem to be aligned specifically with extraversion or introversion, and our culture has moved (fortunately for many of us) in a direction where introverts can make successful niches for ourselves without relying on any advantage of confidence and ease in social situations. The remaining elements of confidence, such as focus, may still play a role, but so may other less well established factors as well.

selected refs:

Eaves, Eysenck, and Martin, (1989). "Genes, Culture, and Personality" Academic Press.

Neubauer and Neubauer, (1990). "Nature's Thumbprint" Addison-Wesley

Kagan, Jerome, (1994). "Galen's Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature"

Costa and McCrae (1990). "Personality in Adulthood," Guilford Press.

Wright, Lawrence, (1997). "Twins, and what they tell us about who we are" Wiley.

Bloom, Howard, (2000). "Global Brain" Wiley. Ch. 16, "Pythagoras, Subcultures, and Psycho-Bio-Circuitry"

kind regards,

Todd
toddstark@aol.com

"I'm an editor at Inc magazine embarking on an article about the somewhat amorphous subject of confidence. Inc's readers are entrepreneurs and owners of fast-growing companies, and most of them would list confidence among the top three traits that got them where they are today. I'd like to skirt the pop-psych concentration on self-esteem and the current media obsession with CEO hubris and determine, if possible, what are the biological/developmental determinants of confidence (if such have been identified) and how those determinants are likely to translate into particular traits and behaviors typical of entrepreneurs (leadership, risk-taking etc.) I don't know whether there's any new or important research or researchers in this area, but I'd greatly appreciate any leads. Thanks."

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