A new study from the University of Copenhagen and University College London has unraveled why some people feel insecure in their abilities - even when they are actually good at what they do.
Imagine you start a new job. You're thrown into new tasks that require you to learn new skills. As you progress, you start to develop a sense that you're good at your job - a sense of confidence in your performance.
Or maybe you're one of those people who continues to doubt your own abilities even though you perform well time and time again. Maybe you're even afraid that one day your boss or colleagues will start thinking that you are incapable of doing the things you need to do at work - the so-called imposter syndrome.
The ability to reflect on ourselves and our capabilities is called metacognition. However, some people's metacognitive processes lead to a distorted view of their own capabilities.
'People with anxiety and depression tend to exhibit persistent underconfidence, as we call it. Their skewed judgement of their own abilities can lead them to avoid new tasks, even when they can do them,' explains Sucharit Katyal, postdoc at the Department of Psychology at the University of Copenhagen.
Digital fruits reveal trend
In a new study, Sucharit Katyal and colleagues from University College London have identified the psychological mechanisms underlying persistent underconfidence.
'We recruited a large number of volunteers via a web-based platform and measured their symptoms of anxiety and depression. We then asked participants to complete a computer game where they had to help the residents of 'Fruitville' in harvesting fruit,' explains Sucharit Katyal.
The participants had to use both their visual and memory skills to complete the tasks. After each individual task, they had to report how confident they felt in their answer. Finally, they had to rate how well they felt they had completed the entire game.
'Here we discovered that participants with symptoms of anxiety and depression often ignored the times when they felt a high sense of confidence in their answers. Instead, they focused on situations where their answers were accompanied by low confidence when judging their overall performance,' says Sucharit Katyal.
Positive feedback works
In other words, the study shows that people with anxiety and depression may satisfactorily perform tasks - but ultimately are not updating their self-perception correctly.
'This points to the need for interventions that specifically address metacognitive distortions in people with anxiety and depression,' says Sucharit Katyal.
Interestingly, the study also shows that people with persistent insecurity in their abilities can correctly update their self-perception when they are explicitly told that they have performed well - rather than them having to rely on their own confidence assessments in those abilities.
'It is actually effective to have these persistently insecure people focus more on their successes and less on their internal insecurities,' says Sucharit Katyal and elaborates:
'This emphasises the importance of positive feedback. Some people need help to take their own judgements with a grain of salt - otherwise they will just maintain a distorted, negative view of their own capabilities,' he notes.
The study, called 'Distorted learning from local metacognition supports transdiagnostic underconfidence', has been published in the scientific journal Nature Communications. You can read the full study here.
