Self-efficacy and social interaction in the personal world

Social Psychology -- Self-Efficacy

When I was a child, I suffered from a relative lack of confidence, often shying away from new experiences, and especially from challenges that seemed capable of allowing me to embarrass myself with failure in the eyes of others. My parents always encouraged me and continually provided positive messages to help me build confidence in my abilities, largely by convincing me that I was tremendously bright, good-looking, and special. In some respects, their efforts were successful; in other respects, their well-motivated strategy may have reversed the original problem by inflating my positive beliefs about myself excessively. In retrospect, I realize that their style of encouragement was too positive because it generated pseudo self-esteem or false self-esteem (Branden, 2007). Since that realization, I have become familiar with the concept of self-efficacy (Myers, 2010), according to which one should always have the ability to become confident but should not necessarily exist a-priori as a personality trait (Aronson, Wilson, & Akert, 2008) or as a fundamental assumption that I am necessarily good at everything.

Genuine Self-Esteem vs. Pseudo Self-Esteem

In principle, both high self-esteem and confidence are generally good attributes. However, there is a fundamental difference between genuine self-esteem and pseudo self-esteem that is often misunderstood (Branden, 2007). Specifically, individuals with genuinely high self-esteem rarely think about how well they compare to others; they are generally non-competitive because they have nothing to prove to themselves or to others. Conversely, individuals with low self-esteem may also be shy and non-competitive, but for fundamentally different reasons such as perpetual self-doubt and the inability to become confident, even when confidence is deserved (Branden, 2007).

Often, when individuals with low self-esteem manage to increase their confidence and feelings of self-worth, it is through identification with external achievements or values (Branden, 2007; Myers, 2010). They may throw themselves into sports or strive for academic excellence and other commonly valued achievements. Unfortunately, to the extent they feel good about themselves or confident, it is mainly in relation to these externalized aspects of themselves. They may wear their varsity sports jackets proudly or relish their positive reputations for various other respected achievements (Branden, 2007; Myers, 2010). The essential difference between this form of artificial or pseudo self-esteem is that individuals whose self-esteem is artificial continually think about those reasons for their positive self-image. They perceive their self-worth mainly in connection with those achievements and their confidence in social situations is largely dependent on the knowledge that others recognize them for those attributes (Branden, 2007).

The Shift from False Confidence to Self-Efficacy

I experienced a period during my later childhood and adolescence where I now realize I had substituted unjustified fears and apprehensions with unjustified confidence and positive beliefs about myself that exceeded my actual abilities. My parents meant to instill in me a sense of self-esteem by inflating my self-image. However, in doing so, they actually infused me with what I have more recently learned to recognize as false confidence. Because I was taught to "be confident" I became equally confident in situations where I knew almost nothing as I was in situations where I deserved to be confident. On several occasions, I allowed myself to become argumentative even after realizing that I was wrong because I believed it was always good to "be confident."