A number of women commenters have pointed out how society accepts 'heightened boldness' more in men than women. They are not wrong.
As a generalisation, women have historically been socialised not to claim their competence - ‘don’t scare the boys away’. As a result, women often won’t apply for a role unless they believe they can do everything in the job description, whereas men are willing to put themselves forwards if they think they can do most of it and handwave the rest.
As an aside, others have noted that entrepreneurs and con-men seem to have quite a bit in common, psychologically speaking. Maybe some entrepreneurs start legit and then when things don’t pan out – slide onto the other side of the ledger.
fiancée and I were falling asleep to creepy YouTube stories (we’re weird) and in the middle of one about a man being stuck in a caving incident there was an advertisement from Chris Luxon and it was the most claustrophobic thing all night
Got the same one a while back. I always click the link just to suck a little bit of money out of that machine that the billionaires are financing. Scary shit this far out from an election.
A number of commenters have noted the sometimes rather loose link between (over)confidence and (in)competence.
Generally speaking, it’s too expensive (in time and effort) to exhaustively verify everything everyone says to us. Admittedly, some people do seem to do that, and it takes them forever to make decisions and we tend to label that either obsessive-compulsive or paranoid 😊
So instead, humans seem to rely on cognitive heuristics (i.e. shortcuts) to gauge whether someone is credible and that we can trust what they say. We tend to use confidence (which we can observe) as an indicator of competence (which we often can’t) and a perception of competence seems to be a key factor in successful persuasion.
For capable people who don’t come across as confident, credibility and persuasion is much harder – cue all the general personal development advice about forming a more realistic assessment of your competence so you can display that you believe in yourself and your abilities – i.e. to show confidence.
When we’re not sure of our ability, there are all kinds of micro-expressions and unconscious body-language we display we make that ‘tell’ on us and signals our lack of confidence – embarrassment and/or deception markers essentially. Psychologist Paul Ekman has written a lot on how emotions show on the face.
I try to keep the Dunning Kruger Effect in mind when evaluating confidence vs competence (I have two teenagers, so I’m doing that a lot!) and so tend to trust the person who’s honest about the boundaries of their competence over the blusterer. And in general, over confidence (or heightened social boldness) is very off-putting.
I am with you Emily. If I come across a new person I’ve not worked with who clearly thinks they’re the smartest person in the room, then they are usually not that person.
Confidence is very poor predictor of competence and performance. But humans seem to be hard wired to overrate confidence. Thus the litany of confidence tricksters who sell a sweet story but are nothing more than the emporer without clothes.
I'm a cis woman in my early 30s working in a male dominated industry (chemistry/engineering research) and I have a few female friends also working in similar workplaces. I notice we all love to bandy around the phrase "oh I know I have imposter syndrome" (and a few of my millennial friends that are men say this too). It's started to dawn on me that what we actually mean is "I have a normal amount of confidence but I perceive all these people (usually white, usually middle-class, usually male) around me to have insane amounts of confidence that make me look like a kitten in the Colosseum". It hasn't been helpful for me in my career to play the self-pitying imposter syndrome card and it probably does harm to people who genuinely have it and would subsequently have a lower quality of life as a result. Instead I just have to kid myself into believing other people when they tell me I'm a confident, competent young scientist. Embrace the fact that there are certain skills I have that I use really well and I tell myself it's selfish of me not to use them to do well in my career. Just like public speaking, I once heard someone say that if you freeze on stage during your speech it's actually a selfish thing because everyone has come there to hear what you have to say.
When Impostor Syndrome was first conceptualised, back in 1978, it was specifically noted as a phenomenon amongst high achieving women. It's been broadened since but there is a gendered (i.e. sexist) overlay to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
When we talk about things like public speaking and other social anxieties, we often focus on the fear and leave out what we are afraid of. Namely, embarrassment and Shame. We have an unspoken epidemic of shame in Western culture and we just don't talk about it enough because we are so ashamed of shame that we pretend that it doesn't exist.
If you've not already found her, Brené Brown is a wonderful resource on this topic, especially for women. Here's a little sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C6UELitWkw
Wow awesome thanks for showing me this! Yes yes yes. I'll make sure I share this with any future postgraduate students I mentor, especially the women. Why doesn't my company run workshops on these kinds of ideas instead of wasting our time with bullshit like how to declutter offices, curate a LinkedIn profile, and compile the perfect CV 😂
Totally! Also, if you've not found and read it already, David did a piece right here on webworm about impostor syndrome (and some other) things a little while back which you might find interesting: https://www.webworm.co/p/impostersyndrome
If you think of your anxiety and worry about confidence (in your area of expertise of course) as a selfish thing, I find it helps to bring a false confidence because you are doing something for others (be it your company, your clients, your kids, your family, society in general) when you bite the bullet and step forward to do something you don't think you have the confidence to do were it just for your own benefit/glory/progress
Feels weird to say what a thoroughly enjoyable read that was considering the subject matter, but it really was, thank you Hayden. You captured the absolute absurdity of our current reign of morally corrupt fuckwits taking their « heightened social boldness « to new levels. We are all living the emperor’s new clothes but in our reality when the child calls bullshit I fear half the audience would turn and tear the child apart while the other half just watch the show. Hard not to feel helpless these days at the best of times.
Always uplifting to read the majority of comments here from a beautiful collection of humans. As always, nothing but love and appreciation for You David and all you bring to us worms. Glad to hear your Arise evening was a success and I hope tonight is equally cathartic and successful.
Premiere was full on. At one point Michael's various victims (although I think "brave humans" is a better term) stood up during the Q&A and spoke to their experiences, some meeting each other properly for the first time - stories separated by years and years. It was a lot and really cathartic as you guessed. I got teary and angry!
It sounds incredible and deeply moving. I think it’s beautiful that you all created a safe space to have this experience.
The photos of the premiere captured the full on vibe well, even down to the torn up road! Hope overall you’re having a great time back in your homeland.
People really seem to like “heightened social boldness” in the white male. It doesn’t seem to work quite as well for anyone else. I’m over in the states dreading the countdown to the next time trump decides to run. It’ll be hanging over our collective heads until he’s legally disqualified or he passes. 😬
My father-in-law is living in the States and is nearly ninety. He is terrified that Trump will run again , he is the boogeyman that keeps coming back to haunt people.
Good luck tonight David! I'm really excited for Mr Organ (which is a sentence I thought I would never utter and still makes me feel more than a little dirty by typing it!). Nau mai, haere mai e hoa! Good to have you back.
My wish is that the academics who study politics can create a political system where people vote on policy... and not media skills, willingness to be in the public eye and skin thickness... there would be many clever people who would do a great job of governing the country, but with the current system, not having the above attributes means we have a very small talent pool to choose from. Political parties should be promoting their policies not their people... and then perhaps we wouldn’t get the con-men rising to the top.
Quite a bit has also been written about how both politics and the corporate world arguably often reward and promote psychopathic traits – the gap between charismatic visionary leadership and psychopathy is smaller than we like to think.
In fact, it has been argued (only somewhat sensationally) that the multinational corporate form which has outsized political influence is fundamentally psychopathic itself – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)
In psychology research, the need to use 'professional' language tends to produce these tame academic euphemisms when a simpler but possibly vulgar phrase would be more apt.
One of my other favourites which crops up in the psychological research around this topic is 'high mating effort' in reference to what we could popularly call the 'bad boy' archetype.
Good luck tonight, David! And great piece of writing by Hayden, as always.
I spent much of my weekend fuming & tweeting about bloody Elon - and I really wish that particular cockwomble wouldn’t fuck up my favourite SM platform quite as majestically as he is - especially not right before the Midterms where literal democracy is on the ballot (maybe for the last time)!
I also didn’t know he didn’t fly that plane dammit! 🤦♀️
As an American, I've never heard the word "cockwomble" before, but, let me tell you, it has just entered my vocabulary. Better yet, is Googling the pronunciation just to be sure I use it correctly. Priceless. Thank you!
Kia ora Hayden! Love your writing - keep them coming!
Is “heightened social boldness” a product of what we value in society? I don’t seen many small BIPOC women with heightened social boldness. We (society) are surely perpetuating this by toxic masculinity and all that bullshit we bathe our children in. Infuse that into some humans with questionable neuronal connections and the product is some truly unhinged shit. People who are genuinely incapable of empathy, or believe that they can get away with anything without consequences. Sadly they are largely correct. I am just amazed at the confidence of these con men! I cannot imagine being so self-assured and stupid at the same time.
Yep I used male pronouns exclusively for this reason and Paul's right that he expanded on this in his email to me. It's my fault for cutting it but hopefully his comment makes up for the edit.
Hi Carolyn. I did touch on gender when I was originally talking to Hayden about this and Shannon mentioned it too. I'll add a top level comment about this.
Thanks David for giving writers like Hayden space on your platform. I'm 100% on-board for insightful, angry rants about the world's greatest shitheads! And good lunch with tonight! :)
It went well. It was full on, but it went well. Just did the Hamilton Q&A tonight and back to Auckland for more! VERY excited this thing finally opens tomorrow. A relief we got it over the line.
Glad to hear it's going well - I also just noticed I had wished you a 'good lunch' (damn auto-correct!). So, just to clarify, I do hope you had a nice lunch, but that was (as you obviously realised) meant to read "good luck"!
I'm booked to see Mr Organ this Friday night at Bridgeway - sooooo keen. Your subject matter is bang on today, DF - I have had so many managers just like those whom you described over the last few years it is astonishing. Luckily I have managed to mostly ignore them and just do my job - but some have done real damage to a lot of people (including myself) - and I will keep repeating my mantra "noise and confidence does NOT mean intelligence and ability".
Yes, this. I developed a theory I call the Skipping Stone Strategy to describe managers who arrive with a fanfare, screw things up royally but have moved on to the next promotion before the consequences of their actions become obvious to everyone else.
I shall henceforth be applying the Skipping Stone Strategy moniker with regard to the countless (usually male) managers that I have seen at this type of work. One I spoke to early in their "career" at one I organisation I contracted to described themselves as a "change manager". True to their word they fucked everything up, lost a whole heap of institutional knowledge with people up and leaving and then were gone themselves six months later to screw up some other organisation.
A number of women commenters have pointed out how society accepts 'heightened boldness' more in men than women. They are not wrong.
As a generalisation, women have historically been socialised not to claim their competence - ‘don’t scare the boys away’. As a result, women often won’t apply for a role unless they believe they can do everything in the job description, whereas men are willing to put themselves forwards if they think they can do most of it and handwave the rest.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/
When I was talking to Hayden, I'd been tempted to say con-persons but criminologically speaking, con artists are overwhelmingly male. Women commit different types of white-collar crime – largely embezzling and ‘quiet fraud’ and far less in-person cons and scams and ‘brazen fraud’. https://www.statista.com/statistics/461354/distribution-of-perpetrators-of-fraud-cases-by-gender/
Of course, maybe some of this can be attributed to a social halo effect – that we assume women are less likely to be criminal which isn’t necessarily true as evidenced by Elizabeth Holmes. https://www.wpr.org/long-history-long-cons-and-shorter-ones-committed-female-con-artists
As an aside, others have noted that entrepreneurs and con-men seem to have quite a bit in common, psychologically speaking. Maybe some entrepreneurs start legit and then when things don’t pan out – slide onto the other side of the ledger.
https://www.inc.com/magazine/201306/alexander-stein/entrepreneurs-and-con-men-have-in-common.html
You got me. The whole time I was thinking about what must have happened during takeoff, and how he knew where the autopilot controls were...
Luxon has that shameless, utter confidence. He is the main character in NZ’s Emperors New Clothes!
https://twitter.com/andrew_r_4/status/1588605567819735042?s=46&t=0ZPo8hLlOCe3MmySr5boDw
fiancée and I were falling asleep to creepy YouTube stories (we’re weird) and in the middle of one about a man being stuck in a caving incident there was an advertisement from Chris Luxon and it was the most claustrophobic thing all night
Hahahahaaha, oh God this sounds horrific. Still - at least NZ isn't yet as nutty as American politics. Not quite.
Thank god I pay the Youtube money machine a premium fee to avoid the adverts. Seeing that would've ruined my day...
Never been more tempted to pull the trigger!
Got the same one a while back. I always click the link just to suck a little bit of money out of that machine that the billionaires are financing. Scary shit this far out from an election.
A number of commenters have noted the sometimes rather loose link between (over)confidence and (in)competence.
Generally speaking, it’s too expensive (in time and effort) to exhaustively verify everything everyone says to us. Admittedly, some people do seem to do that, and it takes them forever to make decisions and we tend to label that either obsessive-compulsive or paranoid 😊
So instead, humans seem to rely on cognitive heuristics (i.e. shortcuts) to gauge whether someone is credible and that we can trust what they say. We tend to use confidence (which we can observe) as an indicator of competence (which we often can’t) and a perception of competence seems to be a key factor in successful persuasion.
https://thedecisionlab.com/insights/business/role-thought-confidence-persuasion
For capable people who don’t come across as confident, credibility and persuasion is much harder – cue all the general personal development advice about forming a more realistic assessment of your competence so you can display that you believe in yourself and your abilities – i.e. to show confidence.
https://hbr.org/2019/03/to-seem-more-competent-be-more-confident
When we’re not sure of our ability, there are all kinds of micro-expressions and unconscious body-language we display we make that ‘tell’ on us and signals our lack of confidence – embarrassment and/or deception markers essentially. Psychologist Paul Ekman has written a lot on how emotions show on the face.
https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/31/turner_ekman.php
I try to keep the Dunning Kruger Effect in mind when evaluating confidence vs competence (I have two teenagers, so I’m doing that a lot!) and so tend to trust the person who’s honest about the boundaries of their competence over the blusterer. And in general, over confidence (or heightened social boldness) is very off-putting.
I guess it's only off-putting to some of us though and a certain proportion just lap it up.
I am with you Emily. If I come across a new person I’ve not worked with who clearly thinks they’re the smartest person in the room, then they are usually not that person.
Confidence is very poor predictor of competence and performance. But humans seem to be hard wired to overrate confidence. Thus the litany of confidence tricksters who sell a sweet story but are nothing more than the emporer without clothes.
I'm a cis woman in my early 30s working in a male dominated industry (chemistry/engineering research) and I have a few female friends also working in similar workplaces. I notice we all love to bandy around the phrase "oh I know I have imposter syndrome" (and a few of my millennial friends that are men say this too). It's started to dawn on me that what we actually mean is "I have a normal amount of confidence but I perceive all these people (usually white, usually middle-class, usually male) around me to have insane amounts of confidence that make me look like a kitten in the Colosseum". It hasn't been helpful for me in my career to play the self-pitying imposter syndrome card and it probably does harm to people who genuinely have it and would subsequently have a lower quality of life as a result. Instead I just have to kid myself into believing other people when they tell me I'm a confident, competent young scientist. Embrace the fact that there are certain skills I have that I use really well and I tell myself it's selfish of me not to use them to do well in my career. Just like public speaking, I once heard someone say that if you freeze on stage during your speech it's actually a selfish thing because everyone has come there to hear what you have to say.
When Impostor Syndrome was first conceptualised, back in 1978, it was specifically noted as a phenomenon amongst high achieving women. It's been broadened since but there is a gendered (i.e. sexist) overlay to it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
When we talk about things like public speaking and other social anxieties, we often focus on the fear and leave out what we are afraid of. Namely, embarrassment and Shame. We have an unspoken epidemic of shame in Western culture and we just don't talk about it enough because we are so ashamed of shame that we pretend that it doesn't exist.
If you've not already found her, Brené Brown is a wonderful resource on this topic, especially for women. Here's a little sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5C6UELitWkw
Wow awesome thanks for showing me this! Yes yes yes. I'll make sure I share this with any future postgraduate students I mentor, especially the women. Why doesn't my company run workshops on these kinds of ideas instead of wasting our time with bullshit like how to declutter offices, curate a LinkedIn profile, and compile the perfect CV 😂
Totally! Also, if you've not found and read it already, David did a piece right here on webworm about impostor syndrome (and some other) things a little while back which you might find interesting: https://www.webworm.co/p/impostersyndrome
If you think of your anxiety and worry about confidence (in your area of expertise of course) as a selfish thing, I find it helps to bring a false confidence because you are doing something for others (be it your company, your clients, your kids, your family, society in general) when you bite the bullet and step forward to do something you don't think you have the confidence to do were it just for your own benefit/glory/progress
I think I've even heard Jacinda Ardern make a similar commentary about hoe she deals with imposter syndrome as PM.
Feels weird to say what a thoroughly enjoyable read that was considering the subject matter, but it really was, thank you Hayden. You captured the absolute absurdity of our current reign of morally corrupt fuckwits taking their « heightened social boldness « to new levels. We are all living the emperor’s new clothes but in our reality when the child calls bullshit I fear half the audience would turn and tear the child apart while the other half just watch the show. Hard not to feel helpless these days at the best of times.
Always uplifting to read the majority of comments here from a beautiful collection of humans. As always, nothing but love and appreciation for You David and all you bring to us worms. Glad to hear your Arise evening was a success and I hope tonight is equally cathartic and successful.
Premiere was full on. At one point Michael's various victims (although I think "brave humans" is a better term) stood up during the Q&A and spoke to their experiences, some meeting each other properly for the first time - stories separated by years and years. It was a lot and really cathartic as you guessed. I got teary and angry!
It sounds incredible and deeply moving. I think it’s beautiful that you all created a safe space to have this experience.
The photos of the premiere captured the full on vibe well, even down to the torn up road! Hope overall you’re having a great time back in your homeland.
People really seem to like “heightened social boldness” in the white male. It doesn’t seem to work quite as well for anyone else. I’m over in the states dreading the countdown to the next time trump decides to run. It’ll be hanging over our collective heads until he’s legally disqualified or he passes. 😬
Ohhhh yes. White men. Always.
Hi Shannon. You're not wrong and both you and Carolyn mentioned this. I've added a top level comment about this.
My father-in-law is living in the States and is nearly ninety. He is terrified that Trump will run again , he is the boogeyman that keeps coming back to haunt people.
I'm with you there! We'll never be rid of the Orange Menace it seems 😣😣😣!
Good luck tonight David! I'm really excited for Mr Organ (which is a sentence I thought I would never utter and still makes me feel more than a little dirty by typing it!). Nau mai, haere mai e hoa! Good to have you back.
Try typing "Tickled Mr Organ" ...
That could lead to a bad place!
And they are all white and products of privilege they did not earn.
These people are also invested in maintaining racism, sexism and all forms of otherism in our societies to our lasting detriment.
Great article Hayden, we need better heros.
Very true - men men men. White white white. Society helped get them there.
My wish is that the academics who study politics can create a political system where people vote on policy... and not media skills, willingness to be in the public eye and skin thickness... there would be many clever people who would do a great job of governing the country, but with the current system, not having the above attributes means we have a very small talent pool to choose from. Political parties should be promoting their policies not their people... and then perhaps we wouldn’t get the con-men rising to the top.
Quite a bit has also been written about how both politics and the corporate world arguably often reward and promote psychopathic traits – the gap between charismatic visionary leadership and psychopathy is smaller than we like to think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_in_Suits
In fact, it has been argued (only somewhat sensationally) that the multinational corporate form which has outsized political influence is fundamentally psychopathic itself – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(2003_film)
"Heightened social boldness" gosh I can think of more concise term
As can I :-)
In psychology research, the need to use 'professional' language tends to produce these tame academic euphemisms when a simpler but possibly vulgar phrase would be more apt.
One of my other favourites which crops up in the psychological research around this topic is 'high mating effort' in reference to what we could popularly call the 'bad boy' archetype.
Good luck tonight, David! And great piece of writing by Hayden, as always.
I spent much of my weekend fuming & tweeting about bloody Elon - and I really wish that particular cockwomble wouldn’t fuck up my favourite SM platform quite as majestically as he is - especially not right before the Midterms where literal democracy is on the ballot (maybe for the last time)!
I also didn’t know he didn’t fly that plane dammit! 🤦♀️
As an American, I've never heard the word "cockwomble" before, but, let me tell you, it has just entered my vocabulary. Better yet, is Googling the pronunciation just to be sure I use it correctly. Priceless. Thank you!
It is one of the best words ever uttered. If I'm having a bad day I mutter that word and feel better.
It’s a good un! 😽
Kia ora Hayden! Love your writing - keep them coming!
Is “heightened social boldness” a product of what we value in society? I don’t seen many small BIPOC women with heightened social boldness. We (society) are surely perpetuating this by toxic masculinity and all that bullshit we bathe our children in. Infuse that into some humans with questionable neuronal connections and the product is some truly unhinged shit. People who are genuinely incapable of empathy, or believe that they can get away with anything without consequences. Sadly they are largely correct. I am just amazed at the confidence of these con men! I cannot imagine being so self-assured and stupid at the same time.
Yep I used male pronouns exclusively for this reason and Paul's right that he expanded on this in his email to me. It's my fault for cutting it but hopefully his comment makes up for the edit.
Hi Carolyn. I did touch on gender when I was originally talking to Hayden about this and Shannon mentioned it too. I'll add a top level comment about this.
Thanks Carolyn and Paul for this.
I love reading you columns Hayden, but my goodness they make me despair for humanity...
I'm sorry! Maybe you can cheer up by watching David's new documentary Mister Organ
😂
Got tickets booked for Friday evening! Can’t wait 🤓
Oh no. I have to admit this wasn't a great recommendation if you want to avoid despairing for humanity
HAYDEN! 😛🤣
Thanks David for giving writers like Hayden space on your platform. I'm 100% on-board for insightful, angry rants about the world's greatest shitheads! And good lunch with tonight! :)
It went well. It was full on, but it went well. Just did the Hamilton Q&A tonight and back to Auckland for more! VERY excited this thing finally opens tomorrow. A relief we got it over the line.
Glad to hear it's going well - I also just noticed I had wished you a 'good lunch' (damn auto-correct!). So, just to clarify, I do hope you had a nice lunch, but that was (as you obviously realised) meant to read "good luck"!
I'm booked to see Mr Organ this Friday night at Bridgeway - sooooo keen. Your subject matter is bang on today, DF - I have had so many managers just like those whom you described over the last few years it is astonishing. Luckily I have managed to mostly ignore them and just do my job - but some have done real damage to a lot of people (including myself) - and I will keep repeating my mantra "noise and confidence does NOT mean intelligence and ability".
Yes, this. I developed a theory I call the Skipping Stone Strategy to describe managers who arrive with a fanfare, screw things up royally but have moved on to the next promotion before the consequences of their actions become obvious to everyone else.
I shall henceforth be applying the Skipping Stone Strategy moniker with regard to the countless (usually male) managers that I have seen at this type of work. One I spoke to early in their "career" at one I organisation I contracted to described themselves as a "change manager". True to their word they fucked everything up, lost a whole heap of institutional knowledge with people up and leaving and then were gone themselves six months later to screw up some other organisation.
omgee, great analogy
Thanks Linda - every ticket sold really helps us stay out longer so THANK YOU!
All true re confidence, sadky. But here's another take on the role of social media, worth considering. Tldr? It may be late 21st C hyper capitalism and not the purported toxicity of social media ... http://werewolf.co.nz/2022/11/gordon-campbell-on-inflating-the-threat-posed-by-social-media/