Better than the majority is the majority
Do you agree with this writer’s assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of a (perhaps overly) self-confident attitude? Why, in your opinion, is such an attitude on the rise? What do you think about the survey that gave us this information? What would the results be if such a survey was given in Slovakia?
I agree with the article that there are many confident students especially in universities. However, I do not necessarily think that how these students present themselves and how they feel inside is the same thing. As the article states, the idea that confident people get the place in university and it is easy to see why.
ReplyDeleteAs I am applying to a university in UK, I have had to write a personal statement mentioning my great virtues and abilities and also captivate my interviewers with my presence and abilities. For a person who is sure of himself this would be a much easier process, so this might be a reason people at least pretend they are confident, even though they might not feel that way.
There is no doubt that much has changed over the past 40 years. For example the process of university admissions that is one of the greatest thing influencing freshmen has gone through a great change. Now the competition for the places is much more fierce as there are more students that can afford the education. Therefore, those students that get the place and went through the survey in the article might be more capable, or simply more confident due to their success.
You made few good points in her response. Firstly, I need to agree with you, Janka, that how people present themselves and to a what extent they are confident is not the same thing, as you have shown on your UCAS example. However, I can see there a high correlation. According to my definition of self-confidence, exactly the ability of presenting yourself makes you confident. Though it depends on the definition of self-confidence, I would say.
DeleteI would like to elaborate on your point about self-confidence and attendance of university. Why do you think people at universities tend to be more confident? There are several aspects influencing this causation. Firstly, students attending a university can get proud of themselves, because it is important success in their life. I mean an actual offer and also a fulfilment of conditions. Of course these who do not attend a university of their primary choice and so are quite disappointed, do not have to have high self-confidence because of attending a university. However, I still believe that getting to your dreamed university can increase your self-confidence.
Secondly, I think it can also be a university-environment itself which increase confidence. I would say that it is similar to attending IB. Since I defy self-confidence as a good feature (see my comment on this article) it is the environment, where you can see talented and skillful people, and exactly this can motivate you to work on yourself. And I believe that when you get better at something, you naturally gain higher self-confidence and so higher ability to present that your particular skills or knowledge.
I completely agree the idea that Janka mentioned, that the way how the students who claim to be self-confident must not necessarily be the way how they really feel, it is often only a way how they present themselves.
DeletePeople often present themselves as self-confident, because they build some sort of protection and feel less vulnerable. It is generally known that people who have appropriate amount of self-confidence are more “accepted” by the society. They are more popular and they have a lot of friends. In addition, even for the opposite gender it is more attractive to see that he/she is self-confident.
Maybe the reason why people claim to be more self-confident nowadays is that they have learned that the more self-confident they appear, the more successful they will be. However, we should always have some borders and know when to stop. This is often a problem, since many people do not know where the limit of their self-confidence should be.
I do not agree with the way how university admissions are done, since I think that it is not very appropriate for people to write over self-confident, narcissistic bullshit, in order to get accepted to a university. Unfortunately, it is the best option at the moment. Even though it is more than sad, but the way how you present yourself is more important than who you really are.
Now that I am reading your comments, especially Barbora's, I have realized that there is another reason people might act more confident that what they really are. As you have mentioned, confident people might form relationships more quickly and they might have it easier to be liked by others. I completely agree with your view.
DeleteIt is natural that some people prefer having less friends, with whom they might have a deeper relationship instead of getting along with everybody. However, the way we have been raised, even the school system, supports the idea that you should get along with everybody. This might make you more ready to work in a job that requires contact with people, but there is also a great number of jobs that do not require you to have people skills. I think that this might be often disregarded as schools are training us to be a model of a successful extrovert. However, I think that more people will start to realize the inadequacy of this model.
I am not able to compare self-confidence of young people in the past and in present days. However, what I can claim is that I find myself in a society, where the majority of people have extraordinary self-confidence. In the article, there is made a parallel or even an equality between self-confidence and narcissism. However, I would rather distinguish these two terms and show the relationship between these.
ReplyDeleteI think that there is nothing wrong with self-confidence at all. It makes the whole society more stable. People are able to present their attitudes, their opinions without feeling shame or discomfort. Confidence makes ideal condition for fruitful debates. Confidence of young people is definitely determined by background which they come from. It is affected by family and support from family, by friends and their support and also by one’s success and achievements. I believe that confident young man means that he is able to present his own ideas and he believes in their rightness. However, I do not understand by confidence the blindness and so an inability of accepting other’s opinions, own critique and own failures. Yet, I cannot claim that self-confidence may lead to such atrocities. I see a high correlation between the high confidence and high blindness. However, I also claim that self-confidence is not an only source of the blindness. Coming back to young children, many of them believe in the rightness of their opinions and just despise other’s points of view which are in opposition to their owns. I am disappointed in human inability to listen to other, but I consider self-confidence as a positive factor of the society.
Narcissism, I understand this term as people’s love of themselves. They are pleased by their look, by their ability of thinking, by their opinions. However, this happiness is measured in large scales. They often show their satisfaction from themselves by long hours spend in front of a mirror or by their strong belief of rightness of their opinions. From this, it is clear that I see a parallel between narcissism and blindness, a usual companion of self-confidence.
Knowing my definition of self-confidence, blindness and narcissism, I would like to briefly state, what I consider as potential sources of these three aspects of human personality. As mentioned above, a key factor determining level of self-confidence is definitely family and background we were raised up in. If a child does not receive any support or any admiration for what he did, he would probably not build a strong wall of self-confidence. I also think that higher the knowledge and understanding of some principles, higher self-confidence will be (you can have blindness and narcissism even without high level of knowledge). This basically means that if I understand something to an extent which I consider as relatively deep, I tend to speak more about my point of view. However, there is not a causal relationship between knowledge and blindness.
I agree with the article that more confident people can gain higher success, since they are not afraid of presenting themselves. However, what makes me sad is a fact that even high level of blindness may lead to high success. In today’s society, blindness is present in people to such a high extent that they may also defy it as to be right. These people often become sources of harm for society. I personally, cannot understand how one can disagree with opinions of others without even analysing them. What I am trying to do, is to always look at particular situation from objective point of view, and so I become, let’s say a third part of that conversation, where I present my opinions, but I am trying to look at them from as not biased way as possible. Some my friends disagree with me, that whenever being in a clash, you need to strongly stand for and fight for your opinions. I do not share their attitude, and even if I strongly believe in my rightness, I am open to other points of view and I try to evaluate them as my own.
Matúš said that confidence makes society more stable. I have something more to say of my opinion about this. Stability is what I think was in the Middle Age under the ultimate power of kings and the Church. On the other hand, times of enlightenment brought intellectual, scientific and industrial progress. Knowledge comes with higher confidence, as Matúš mentioned slightly too. I also agree that only people who are confident enough to express and justify their opinions can raise a fruitful debate. However, confidence often goes hand in hand with increasing demands for privileges of certain groups, which frequently leads to public protests, political quarrels and open conflicts between the parties sometimes as well. Equality and protection of the rights of minorities are certainly desired, i only wanted to point out that there are different views of what social stability means. Lively public debates and political turmoil are thus beneficial. After all, we may say that modern democracies are more stable than dictatorships on a large scale thanks to the way most disputes are resolved that no revolution has yet occurred. However, democracies are more dynamic, so they might seem less stable on the small scale.
DeleteAnyway, I quite agree with the distinction between self-confidence and narcissism Matúš made and I fully agree that family background mainly determines how confident would an individual be. Blindness, or arrogance I would rather call it, is often an even worse companion of confidence than narcissism. I agree that arrogance is a big problem and a threat to an open society. I wish more people were able - but willing in the first place! - to think about the other's opinion and try to reach an objective perspective. However, this is very difficult and I dare to say that an objective point of view can hardly exist in the question of abortion, for example. Nevertheless, I think the bigger problem for the majority of the young generation is to have their own, justified opinions. The fact that makes me sad is that many people furiously defend their opinions without evidence, are mislead by prejudice or lack an opinion of their own altogether. Hence, the first step towards fruitful debates and an open society is that people learn to think in the first place.
I pretty much agree with the author of this blog entry, when he mentioned the advantages and disadvantages of the self-confident attitude of people. I was thinking for a long time about the reason, why people might be more self-confident that they were 40 years ago, and I could not come up with a specific reason.
ReplyDeleteHowever, I must not forget to mention that the claimed self-confidence is strongly connected to the culture people live in. I am pretty sure that culture and maybe religion, since religion is strongly related to culture, might be a great and depending factor in this survey. For example, if the research would have been done in China, where people are raised with the idea that they should conform to some social and cultural manners, the results would probably be very different. Since this research was done in the United Stated of America, people claimed to be more self-confident, because of the fact that they are raised to act independently and do whatever they want to do. However, even when I considered this important factor, I could not figure out why the people in America claimed to be less self-confident, since the American culture is and always was raised to be independent.
The main question still remains, is it prosperous when the people claim to be more self-confident, or is it just a matter of narcism? I think that this depends on each person separately. We are all different, and it would be subjective and irrelevant to generalize.
In my opinion, if this survey would have been done in Slovakia, people would be definitely more self-confident nowadays, since 40 years ago they were oppressed by communism. They could not have their own opinion or differ from the majority.