Women and people with anxiety often doubt their own abilities. However, a new research from University College London (UCL) suggests that this shared underconfidence hides two very different psychological mechanisms.
For this study, researchers analysed data from 1,447 participants across two previously published experiments. Each participant was subjected to simple perceptual tasks; for example, deciding whether the image had more red or purple berries and then rating their confidence in that decision.
Crucially, the team also measured the time participants took to report their confidence.
The results were fascinating:
Anxiety-driven underconfidence: Those with high anxiety were less confident. They also took longer to reflect on their answers. This is due to negative rumination, a mental spiral that erodes certainty as time passes.
0.5 Percent of the population suffers from severe psychological trauma, found scientists
Gender-related underconfidence: Women, who were initially less insecure than men, actually gained confidence when given more time. Over time, the confidence gap between men and women narrowed, suggesting different internal thresholds for evaluating certainty.
Lead author Dr Sucharit Katyal, who conducted the work at the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research before moving to the University of Copenhagen, explained:
“Previous studies have shown that women and people with anxiety are more prone to being underconfident in their abilities, even without any difference in actual abilities. But here, we wanted to find out whether women are underconfident in the same way that those with anxiety tend to lack confidence.”
To dig deeper, the team developed a dynamic computational model to track how confidence evolves over time. The model supported the idea that anxious individuals suffer from accumulating negative self-evaluations, while women’s underconfidence reflects a different calibration of certainty thresholds.
Dr Katyal emphasised the broader implications:
“These results show that underconfidence is not a single phenomenon with a single cause, as we identified two different types of underconfidence, one that tends to affect people with anxiety, and one more common among women. Different groups arrive at similar patterns of self-underestimation through very different routes.”
The study highlights the need of customised approaches to both mental health treatment and efforts to address societal disparities in confidence.
Senior author Professor Steve Fleming (UCL Psychology & Language Sciences) highlighted the potential impact: “By revealing the mechanisms behind these biases, we may be able to design targeted interventions, for example, helping anxious individuals interrupt the accumulation of negative self-evaluations, or encouraging slower, more reflective decision-making to counteract gender-related confidence gaps.”
Journal Reference:
- Sucharit Katyal and Stephen Fleming. Gender and anxiety reveal distinct computational sources of underconfidence. Psychological Medicine. DOI: 10.1017/S0033291725102808
