On confidence and arrogance
On confidence and arrogance
and the implications for military leadership
One of the questions posed to our army students this year is about the relationship between confidence and arrogance, and the military implications thereof. It’s great to see some psychology making its way into the strategic studies curriculum. That’s one of the most welcome changes over the years I’ve been doing this job. And it got me thinking – what do I reckon about confidence and arrogance? At 49, I’ve seen plenty of both.
So – noting that this certainly isn’t a model answer (hence my cavalier disregard for references), here’s my Montaigne pastiche:
Confidence and arrogance are sometimes seen as close bedfellows – perhaps lying on a spectrum, where too much confidence manifests as arrogance. This is wrong – the two are very different traits, with different underlying psychologies and different implications for leadership. Let’s see how.
Confidence involves self-appraisal, relative to some situation or task. That reflection could be conscious, or not. It could be an appraisal made in the moment, tied to a particular challenge; or it might be a more general attitude brought to bear as we encounter the world. What they have in common is the underlying motif – ‘I can do this’.
There’s a connection here to extraversion and neuroticism – two of the ‘big five’ traits employed by mainstream personality psychologists. The confident person chooses by default to approach, rather than avoid. And they don’t worry or ruminate overly on outcomes – in particular they don’t fret about social judgment. It’s not that they don’t care about others, or about what they think – the confident person is a good judge of people, but not a slave to their opinions.
Confidence fosters resilience against knocks. Hence a finding that healthy people have perhaps a little too much of it. Thus, psychologists detect ‘agency bias’ (the over-belief that we are in control), ‘optimism bias’ (a confidence that things will turn out ok), and ‘attribution bias’ (when things do go wrong, the problem isn’t our internal attributes, but the situation). Confidence is rooted in self-esteem and self-worth. The confident person may sometimes doubt themselves, but they certainly respect themselves.
Arrogance is very different. It’s a perception held by others, rather than felt ourselves. The arrogant person experiences only a feeling of superiority, or self-righteousness. Onlookers, by contrast, see the arrogance all too clearly. So, arrogance, like conceitedness, is connected to social judgment – by the arrogant person of their own relative standing and attributes, and by others, of their undeserved social superiority. There’s an obvious connection between arrogance and dominance. The arrogant person is acutely status conscious. We all are, to some degree. But the arrogant person succeeds in validating their self-worth largely by rubbishing others.
Arrogance might be independent of cognitive ability (IQ), but not of emotional intelligence and empathy. The arrogant person might actually be great at complex tasks, or strategic thinking. But not where the task involves a social element, as many do. And insofar as arrogance alienates the group and so undermines leadership, it produces suboptimal outcomes.
There’s a clear connection between arrogance and narcissism. Both involve intense self-regard and judgment of others. They are explicitly social. Whereas the confident person doesn’t need to factor the worth of others in their self-view, the narcissist does. Without the supposedly second-rate audience watching on, the arrogant person has nothing with which to contrast their own superiority. Arrogance, like narcissism, has a complex relationship to self-esteem – both traits could be rooted in a grandiose self-belief; or alternatively they could be a coping mechanism for dealing with low self-esteem. Many an arrogant person lacks confidence.
Lastly, arrogance is sometimes confused with shyness, because of the shared aloofness – Mr Darcy recognised the problem. They manifest similarly, and perhaps also share similar underlying mechanisms – with both rooted in a lack of self-worth and excessive rumination on our personal story. But shyness is not paired with contempt – the key ingredient of arrogance.
So – confidence and arrogance are strikingly dissimilar, both in character and underlying psychological mechanisms. But both can present in a similar way –assurance about which choice to make. And both can produce similar problems, whether for individual judgment, or for effective leadership. These problems include a skewed appraisal of risk, superficial attention to situations and contexts, and inattention to judgments of others (because, after all, I know best (arrogance) and I’ve got this (confidence)). Arrogance is always a weakness – for those on the receiving end and, though they might not appreciate it, for the unloved narcissist too. Confidence, in contrast, is a weakness only where excessive self-belief warps judgment to the point where reality rudely intercedes.
Ultimately, confidence is usually perceived as virtue, and arrogance not. Confidence inspires, arrogance repels. Confidence is authentic, whereas arrogance is the hallmark of someone at odds with themselves. The confident person says, ‘I can do this’ – or better yet, ‘we can do this’. The arrogant person says, ‘watch me excel’ and, ‘why are you so useless?’ The grandiose narcissist says, simply, ‘I’m the best’ – and possibly even believes it. And the covert (low self-esteem) narcissist asks, ‘why does no one recognise my specialness?’
Where do they come from, these attributes? As with most traits, there’s likely a considerable degree of heredity, no matter how uncomfortable that claim makes some feel. Genes matter more than we thought a few decades ago, when the notion of the person as a ‘blank slate’ was at its modern high. The proportion of variation in a given trait that can be explained by genes is usually somewhere between 40 and 60 percent and sometimes – as with IQ – even higher. Of course, these are hard traits to measure, other than subjectively – for one, they’re likely complexes of other attributes, like extraversion and optimism. And even if genes factor, clearly the environment still matters, as it does with most traits. Perhaps not so much the family environment – modern research shows this is over-rated for many traits. But certainly the environment outside the home, especially among childhood friends and at school. Noise – the random walk of life – is a large factor too; larger than commonly appreciated. And then, lastly, there’s the puzzling tendency for genes to matter more as we grow older, and experience more environments. That seems counterintuitive – why? In part because of the ‘nature of nurture’: the compound effect that follows our choices of which environments we inhabit. As we age, we spend more time doing what suits our (genetically influenced) character, working with the grain of our crooked timber. So, perhaps, the danger that the arrogant person becomes set in their ways.
Do people have the capacity to change? Can we train confidence? Can we undermine it? Can we coach modesty into the arrogant? To some degree, perhaps, we can do all these. But only to some degree. Daniel Nettle, longtime student of personality, likened it to a radio – the large tuning frequency is set early on, but we have scope to fine tune as adults. It’s a lively, unsettled debate.
To what extent should the military leader be confident? Clearly some confidence is preferable – paralysis of indecision is not a good trait, nor biddability. Does it matter if the leader has doubts and fears? Not if they have self-respect, from which flows the respect of others. Leadership is performance, to some degree – the self-confident leader manages their fears and projects assurance. They are resilient to knockbacks, and able to change course and accept challenge.
The arrogant leader looks superficially similar – and that’s a problem for those selecting leaders. They exude assurance, even if it’s to mask their own inferiority, or in pursuit of social dominance. The result, if the team is unlucky in its leader: hubris, antagonism, and poor cohesion.
[The robots will be back soon, don’t worry!]