more stories

Coherence

The confidence we experience as we make a judgment is not a reasoned evaluation of the probability that it is right. Confidence is a feeling, one determined mostly by the coherence of the story and by the ease with which it comes to mind, even when the evidence for the story is sparse and unreliable. The bias toward coherence favors overconfidence. An individual who expresses high confidence probably has a good story, which may or may not be true. (Don’t Blink! The Hazards of Confidence - NYT)

If:

• confidence follows coherence
• coherence comes from stories
• stories are coherent when they come to mind easily

Then the social and political consequences of normativity are almost unfathomable. The stories we’re used to determine what we see as strange or aberrant and what we see as simple or coherent. We’re very used to stories of men succeeding; it’s little wonder that men might have somewhat more coherent subjectivities — and “act on their useless ideas significantly more often than women do”.

Which would seem to suggest that men should be a little less confident.

As @kissane pointed out, this doesn’t exactly jibe with the advice that women are given.

If women need to show up to work with more confidence in order to be treated equally to men in the workplace, then obviously what we need is more cultural stories about successful, diverse* women.

Recently, an article suggested that “women-led startups have fewer failures” despite far fewer of them — the kind of dubiously good news we might have to sacrifice if women get more confident, equal, and foolhardy.

But then, on the other hand — as the Tea Party and Glenn Beck can testify — the emergence of new norms that grant coherence to minorities and traditionallyothered populations fundamentally threaten the confidence of those whose cultural coherence was previously unbroken. In less abstract, vastly general terms: when women and gay people and black people and immigrants start making sense, straight white dudes can get a little confused about how they fit in with all these new stories.

And, if coherence » confidence » mistakes, that should mean that they’ll lose some of their share of the failure.

So hypothetically, if we could expand the range of norms and stories so that everyone could find coherence, no one group would have a monopoly on confidence, foolhardiness, or failure.

It’s kind of wonderful to think that equality might actually mean more stories, more nuance, and an equal chances to fail because we — and others — believed in ourselves.

* N.B.: By diverse I mean different colors, different backgrounds, and different shapes. The Woman Who Is Obsessed with Her Career and Is No Fun at All and The Woman Who Works in an Art Gallery aren’t contributing a ton to our cultural bank of stories that help us make coherent sense out of our work lives.