The Confidence Code (6 page)

What we saw in Kepecs’s lab at Cold Spring Harbor sharpened our picture of confidence. For one thing, if the rats were to be believed, it was not merely a brand of aggressive behavior, or an endless focus on feeling good about oneself. A rat’s confidence might be broadly described as a belief that it can create a successful outcome (drops of water) through its action (waiting). We saw a hint of self-efficacy in that. It’s a chain of events that all starts, we observed, with that very basic, perhaps unconscious, confidence calculation, which then encourages the rest of the action.

Kepecs gave us a deeper take on confidence, for both rats and humans. In his view, confidence has a distinctive double nature, or shows “two faces.” One face is objective: that basic calculation process, a critical confidence tool we’d watched the rats employ. The other face, Kepecs told us, is subjective. Confidence is also something we experience as a feeling.
That’s
the confidence we’re more familiar with, and spend a lot more time around, at least consciously. It’s the more emotional element, its alluring promise yet illusory nature constantly tripping us up. Rats too, Kepecs believes,
feel
their confidence in some ways.

It occurred to us, in the middle of this engrossing and enlightening session, that women would be well served by spending a bit more time rubbing shoulders with Kepecs’s version, or really any of confidence’s other lesser-known, less glamorous, more workman-like renderings. Maybe confidence shouldn’t be so mysterious and glamorous and perversely aspirational-only. How refreshing to view it, at least in part, as a simple, concrete tool: an extremely useful compass, perhaps, if we could just get the darn thing working.

Naturally, we started wondering how we measured up. Were we as confident as the rats, at least? We asked the ever-patient Dr. Kepecs whether he could measure our basic, objective confidence somehow, without surgically implanting electrodes or forcing us to inhale a lot of questionable odors. Kepecs had been running some similarly themed tests on students using only computer games. That sounded good to us. As we attempted the various, unfamiliar screen challenges though, we were each surprised to feel considerable anxiety about how we were performing. We found out pretty quickly that we’d both scored extremely well—both in our statistical confidence (measured by how long we took to rate our confidence in each answer) and in our actual accuracy. But just before we got that news, the two of us compared notes, confessed our nerves, and predicted to each other that we’d both bombed. And, at that moment, we really meant it. Sigh.

It was our own twisted version of that familiar paradox. We found our participation in it hard to believe. We’d read so much research about women doubting and underestimating their performance on tests, but we still couldn’t fully avoid experiencing it. There we had been, performing perfectly well, not only answering questions fairly accurately, but also simultaneously reporting high levels of confidence in those answers, and yet we still experienced palpable self-doubt, and
told ourselves
, and each other, that we expected we’d done poorly. What is that? Maybe, we speculated, the female subjective and objective confidence wiring is just totally crossed somehow. We also wondered whether this disturbing pattern of behavior is confined to the human female.

We were starting to stray into the psychological, the philosophical and the bizarre with a host of human-specific questions when Kepecs reminded us that the rat/human comparison is limited. Confidence is clearly more labyrinthine for higher-order, abstract thinkers. Rats don’t brood, for example, second-guess themselves, or lie in bed frozen with indecision. And they don’t suffer from a gender-driven confidence gap either. There was only a certain amount Kepecs, and his influential work, could explain for us. It was time to look at confidence outside the lab.

Into the Wild

On a day when the rest of the Georgetown student body was outdoors, enjoying an unseasonably warm spring sun, we found a dozen young women cooped up in a classroom, learning how to run a political campaign. They were there thanks to a nonprofit organization called Running Start, which was founded to train college-age women to run for public office. The women were smartly dressed and not timid exactly, but quiet and serious. When we arrived, they were huddled in groups of three or four discussing their motivations for running for college positions.

One girl was upset that condoms weren’t sold on campus; another that there were no rape kits. One student worried about how the college endowment was used; another about how research positions were allocated. A Running Start facilitator, Katie Shorey, led the conversation, gently guiding the separate discussions: “If you were to run, what would you talk about and try to change? How passionately do you feel about this issue?”

These were women who wanted to change the world, and they were nurturing aspirations of running for political office. They were among the best and the brightest, or they wouldn’t be at Georgetown. We joined the class that day expecting to meet some of the country’s most self-assured young women, hoping they’d help us define confidence.

What struck us immediately was how polite and considerate they were. They didn’t just jump into the discussion; they raised their hands first, asking, “May I add something?” or “Can I suggest this?” We couldn’t help thinking how different it would be with a group of men. Would they ask permission before speaking? Most young men would be louder, more assertive, keener to make sure their opinions were heard. Men’s attention to good manners might be lacking, and their rude interruptions annoying (at least to women), but their conversations, we suspected, might be less cautious. Not for the first time, we wondered about the tipping point between assertiveness and jerkiness. To put it bluntly—does one have to be an asshole to be confident?

As the women gathered back into one group, we put a question to this room of diligent, high-scoring achievers: Who among them feels confident about running for a post on the student body? Not a single hand went up. So, we asked: What is it that makes you feel so nervous? And, in their answers, these Georgetown students painted a vivid picture of all the things confidence is
not
.

“Running for office means we have to self-aggrandize. That’s hard because people might think we’re pushy.”

“If I lose, it’ll be about me, because they don’t like me.”

“I internalize setbacks. The other day a professor criticized my research paper. The guy I’d worked on it with just brushed it off. It didn’t seem to bother him. It took me weeks to get over it.”

“I ran for a position in high school once with a guy student and we won. I was more shy and he was more confident, but I did all the work. The next year we ran against each other, and I lost. But I know I was the more competent one. I did all the hard work. It was a real blow.”

“If a woman is assertive and ambitious, she’s seen as a bitch. But for a guy, hey, those are normal qualities.”

“I went to an all-girls school. It was so empowering because everyone who raised their hand in class to ask a question was a girl. It was normal. But then, I came here; I saw that the girls didn’t speak up in class. And here’s what’s really sad—started copying them. I started raising my hand less and self-censoring—just in order to fit in.”

After the uncomplicated rats (who show no obvious gender bias in confident decision making, by the way), this conversation was a letdown. We recognized, yet again, what a waste of energy and talent all of this agonizing can be. We discussed it with Jessica Grounds, the cofounder of Running Start, who recently joined the powerhouse Ready For Hillary political action committee to handle all of their outreach for women. She told us that her team had come to realize, over the years, that what these ambitious young women need most isn’t a primer in running for office as much as basic confidence training. They have the skills; what they lack is self-belief, and without it they can’t turn their
desire
to run into the
action
of running. If they don’t take the chance, they will be stuck, spinning around inside their heads like Adam Kepecs’s rats on a treadmill. We say this not with contempt, but with the recognition that many of their anxieties rang true to us personally.

We both spent too much of our twenties and thirties stuck in self-doubt, and yes, we both still devote too much time to internalizing setbacks. After delivering a speech not long ago to applause and compliments, Claire spent a good hour wondering why two women, in a room of more than a hundred, had looked somewhat bored. For the sake of their own sanity and happiness, young women have to find a way to interrupt that negative soundtrack—much sooner, we hope, than we’ve been able to.

Five-Star Confidence

A host of bureaucracy and formality comes with a visit to one of the most senior women in the U.S. military: multiple security checks, multiple escorts through a matrix of endless corridors, thickly paneled with rousing paintings of seminal battles and imposing portraits of heavily decorated, square-jawed, almost exclusively male, generals and admirals. And then there’s that mouthful of a title: The Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. When we finally made our way to Major General Jessica Wright, however, in her suite of offices tucked deep inside the Pentagon, she was surprisingly, refreshingly, not what we expected. While her office décor is predictably masculine—leather club chairs and mahogany tables—Wright was anything but. She may be top brass, but she was down-to-earth, guiding us to a sofa and putting us at ease with a few questions.

The general’s eyes were bright and inquisitive, and she made a point of listening carefully. There was no bluster or overly aggressive assertiveness about her; she doesn’t condescend. She was also resolutely feminine, no doubt following one of the top ten leadership tips she shares with other women: Enjoy getting your hair and nails done. Just because you’re working in a man’s world, she laughed, doesn’t mean you always have to look like them. We liked that. Wright wasn’t curbing her own personality to try to fit into a mold; she had the moxie to be true to herself. Daring to be bold about girlfriendy things like manicures and blowouts while holding a general’s rank in the most powerful military in the history of the world seemed pretty confident to us.

Another thing we really liked about Wright’s style of confidence: She was prepared to admit to nerves, but she didn’t let them stop her from pursuing her goals and ambitions. She described taking command of an army combat brigade in 1997, the first woman to do so, and feeling so nervous she could barely breathe. “My mother taught me to be stoic,” she said with a smile, “but my insides were a spaghetti bowl of feelings and confusion and anxiety.”

We should dispel any impression that General Wright is an angst-ridden pushover, though. You don’t get to her position without a certain amount of grit. She doesn’t hesitate often. She told us that good leadership means being an efficient decision maker, and she doesn’t tolerate indecision in others. “When somebody says to me, ‘Well, I don’t know what to do,’ I don’t have time for that. Because if I ask you to give me your opinion and you’re wishy-washy with me, I’m moving on. We’re always on a fast-moving train,” she said, crisply, and we got a sense she’s not somebody you’d want to let down.

Or underestimate. Because, when pushed, Jessica Wright acts, even when intimidated. She remembers the occasion when she was a brand-new lieutenant, and a superior told her straightaway that he didn’t like females in the military. “There were five hundred things going through my head,” she said. “And I looked at him and said, ‘Sergeant Minski, you have an opportunity now to get over that.’
 
” She smiled mischievously at our laughter. “I still don’t know how that came out of my mouth. I really don’t.”

Her bold retort paid off. The misguided sergeant and she became friends, and he even mentored her as a young officer. She puts it down to that first encounter, when she proved she could, and would, stand up for herself.

We’d paid a visit to Wright hoping she’d help us characterize confidence. In the end, she didn’t even have to describe it for us because she demonstrated it so clearly in her style, her stories, and her observations. In our notebooks, in addition to having drawn big bold circles around her Sergeant Minski quote, which we were eager to appropriate, we’d jotted down—
action
and
bold
and
makes decisions
. But we’d also written
honest
and
feminine
. And also this:
comfortable.
General Wright has the layers of emotional complexity we didn’t find in Adam Kepecs’s lab, but she has overcome the torment of those Georgetown students. To us, she had a handle on what we were starting to understand is real confidence.

Life Lessons on a Kiteboard

We had a nascent theory in the works, and we wanted to try it out on the experts, the psychologists who make this subject their life’s work. We started by asking them this seemingly simple question: How do you define confidence? Time and again, we were met with a long pause, followed by, “Well, it’s complicated.”

“Confidence,” said Joyce Ehrlinger, the University of Washington psychologist, sighing in sympathy, “has become a vague, almost stock term that can refer to any number of things. I can see why you’d be confused.”

“General confidence is an attitude, a way you approach the world,” suggested Caroline Miller, a best-selling author and positive psychology coach. “More specifically, self-confidence is a sense that you can master something.”

“One way to think about confidence,” said Brenda Major, the UC Santa Barbara social psychologist, “is how sure are you that you have the skills that you need to succeed in doing a particular thing.”

“It’s a belief that you can accomplish the task you want to accomplish,” Utah State University’s Christy Glass told us. “It’s specific to a domain. I could be a confident public speaker, but not a confident writer, for example.”