Here’s a model of self-confidence. People meet you and they decide if they admire/respect/lust after you. You can tell if they do. When they do you learn that you are more admirable/respectable/attractive than you previously knew you were. Knowing this increases your expectation that the next person will react the same way. That means that when you meet the next person you are less nervous about how they will judge you. This is self-confidence.
Your self-confidence makes a visible impression on that next person. And it’s no accident that your self-confidence makes them admire/respect/lust after you more than they would if you were less self-confident. Because your self-confidence reveals that the last person felt the same way. When trying to figure out whether you are someone worthy of admiration respect or lust, it is valuable information to know how other people decided because people have similar tastes on those dimensions.
And of course it works in the opposite direction too. People who are judged negatively lose self-confidence and their unease is visible to others and makes a poor impression.
For this system to work well it must escape herding and prevent manipulation. Herding would be a problem if confident people ignore that others admire them only because they are confident and they allow these episodes to further fuel their confidence. I believe that the self-confidence mechanism is more sophisticated than this. Celebrities complain about being unable to have real relationships with regular people because regular people are unable to treat celebrities like regular people. A corollary of this is that a celebrity does not gain any more confidence from being mobbed by fans. A top-seeded tennis player doesn’t gain any further boost in confidence from a win over a low-ranked opponent who wilts on the court out of awe and intimidation.
Herding may be harder to avoid on the downside. If people who lack confidence are shunned they may never get the opportunity to prove themselves and escape the confidence trap.
And notwithstanding self-help books that teach you tricks to artificially boost your self-confidence, I don’t think manipulation is a problem either. Confidence is an entry, nothing more. When you are confident people are more willing to get to know you better. But once they do they will learn whether your self-confidence is justified. If it isn’t you may be worse off than if you never had the entry in the first place.
Drawing: Life is a Zen Roller Coaster from http://www.f1me.net
Cheap Talk 
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May 30, 2012 at 8:40 am
twicker
Interesting thoughts; I like the way that you’re looking at it here.
(quick pre-note: I’ll admit that I haven’t looked at the confidence/esteem literature in some time, but my recollection is that what you’re talking about is, in the psych world, generally considered to be self-esteem – one’s overall impression of oneself and one’s value – as opposed to self-confidence, which is task- and context-specific. For example, someone could have low-to-moderate self-esteem – they don’t think they’re really worth very much – and be very self-confident when, say, making French toast, because it’s something they’re expert at. It’s one of the ways that people are taught to build their outwardly-projected confidence: go do the things you’re really good at, get some recent easy wins under your belt, and you’ll feel better about yourself. Not that important to the discussion, but, if you want to look up the literature, that might help.)
A few things that came to mind:
1) I’m not sure that we can, in fact, very accurately assess whether or not people find us attractive/confident/etc. In fact, especially for us guys, there’s a good deal of evidence that shows that we greatly overestimate how much women find us attractive: we think they’re really into us, when they’re just being polite (researched by asking women how much they were attracted to a group of men based on in-person interactions, and comparing that to asking the same men how attracted they perceived the women to be – big, big differences).
2) Our perceptions of other people’s perceptions (the real causal pathway) are highly dependent on:
+ Our underlying personality traits
+ Our socialization from family and friends
+ Cultural factors
Bringing up the rear would be the last person that we interacted with – because our perceptions of their reactions are based on how we make sense of their reactions. If we’re used to having attractive women want to talk to us and then an attractive woman disses us, we may feel a very temporary hit to our confidence/esteem but it’s likely to be temporary: we have too much evidence to contradict that hit. In fact, we may use motivated cognition to decide that our disser is a jerk – “sour grapes” – and we didn’t so much get “dissed” as we dodged a bullet. Thank God we didn’t end up wasting our time with her! And, if we’re so awesome at figuring out who the jerks are, then … wow! Hot dang, but we’re awesome!
Note that all this works for any social interaction scenario: I used the attempt to attract women because you and I happen to be heterosexual males, so it’s something that resonates with the two of us; it’s easily modifiable to any other situation.
3) As mentioned in my pre-note, there are, in fact, several techniques available to build self-confidence/self-esteem. They work because self-confidence/self-esteem depend entirely on our perceptions of other people’s perceptions. We have a multitude of tools for changing our perceptions – the stories we tell ourselves about why things happen (but one example: CBT), and they have really great success rates. It’s the same reason people can learn to become great public speakers: if we tell ourselves a story of how much we’ll bomb the presentation, then we’ll probably bomb it. If we tell ourselves a story about how awesome we’re going to be, then we at least have a chance of being awesome (we still have to have something interesting to say and an interesting way of saying it).
It all comes down to perception. So yes – there’s very definitely a strong factor re: the most recent series of interactions, but that’s preceded by the stories we have developed to make sense of the interactions.
Thanks for posting. 🙂