Confidence or Ability: Which one is more important?

Confidence matters.  And more than you think.  That’s the bottom line from a new series of studies which reveals that when confidence is manipulated (more on this, in a moment), people perform significantly better. 
Much of the research examines the confidence-ability conundrum by testing people’s 3D mental rotation ability – a skill commonly thought to be better in males than females.  And, indeed, in test after test, males do seem to score considerably higher. But when confidence is factored into the mix, the sex differences appear to dissolve. 

How could this be?

Enter the stereotype threat, a psychological term defined as “the tendency for members of a negatively stereotyped group to underperform on tasks relevant to a culturally salient stereotype,” according to Dr. Scott Kaufman, who wrote about the subject recently in the Huffington Post. Kaufman cited four recent studies which confirmed what others have found, and what in some ways is transparent – that when you expect to perform well at a given task, you do remarkably better.  In addition, Kaufman maintains, confidence may be related to working memory; in other words, when your confidence is low it restricts your working memory which in turn lowers your ability to perform well. 

Now back to confidence manipulation.  Angelica Moè and Francesca Pazzaglia of the University of Padau performed a series of experiments to explore if expectation altered performance. First they had both men and women complete a test of mental rotation.  After the first round, some participants were informed that men do better on the task, and others were told that women do better on the task.  Enter, round two. The same participants took another test of mental rotation, and guess what?  Explained Kaufman: “Women performed significantly worse after being told men do better on the task, whereas women who were told that women do better on the task performed significantly better at the very same task. Similarly, men performed better after being told that men are better at the task and performed worse after being told that women are better at the task. What we believe is true matters.”

What’s at work here?  Confidence.  University of Warwick psychology researcher Dr Zachary Estes, working with Dr Sydney Felker from the University of Georgia Health Center, found that confident people, regardless of gender, were more accurate.  Concludes Kaufman: “So confidence matters for everyone.”  And to fully test that confidence really was the difference (and not each individual’s ability to perform a mental rotation task), the researchers injected a sophisticated layer of confidence manipulation . . . and achieved the same results.  

Why does this all matter?  Because, in the classroom, student expectations drive performance. In a 2006 study by Matthew McGlone and Joshua Aronson (University of Texas at Austin), the authors explained: “Stereotype threat research provides insight into how the low standardized test scores of students from stigmatized social groups may derive in part from the negative performance expectations about these groups.” 

What can we do?  We can remind students about their membership in group linked to positive performance.  McGlone and Aronson tested this hypothesis by priming female college students.  And sure enough, women primed to contemplate their identify as students at a selective private college outperformed those who were primed to contemplate their sex or a test-irrelevant identity. 

So, think you’re elite, and you just might be.