Witness Testimony: Understand the Confidence/Competence Circle

By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:

For someone starting out in a career, or in some other situation where credibility will be required, there is an expression: “Fake it until you make it.” In other words, if you act like you’ve got it, then people are going to believe that you’ve got it…and then you’ll have it. The idea is that there is a nice self-reinforcing circle between confidence and competence with each one helping to build up the other. For a witness approaching the task of deposition or trial testimony, especially for the first time, that circle is important to understand. And it is something to treat carefully as well, because confidence — particularly when it is artificially generated — can be a tricky thing.

A recent, very large-scale study points out the ways that confidence, even overconfidence, can be effective. In an article published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (Belmi et al., 2019), researchers found that members of higher social classes tend to have exaggerated beliefs about their own competence on a variety of tasks where they actually don’t have greater competence. But the kicker is that this overconfidence works: Their greater confidence is perceived by others as greater competence. To the authors, this explains a central mechanism in the maintenance and perpetuation of social class divisions: Higher classes act as though they have greater abilities, and the rest of society acts as though they’re right. In this post, I’ll look at the study and what it says to the litigation witness trying to manage both confidence and perceived competence.

The Research

The idea that we treat confidence as a behavioral proxy for a wide variety of desirable character traits isn’t new. But the scope of the new study, as well as its look into the role of class, is new. Using a very large dataset, 152,661 participants, the research team looked at varied populations including small business owners in Mexico and university students in the United States. The team had participants perform various tasks and then rate themselves on how they think they did in comparison to others. Researchers then compared actual scores to predicted scores. Using 950 independent judges, they also had participants review the tasks of others on video — e.g., a simulated job interview — and rate how well the candidates did.

As briefly explained in a ScienceDaily release as well as a New York Times article, there were two main findings. First, class shapes views of competence. Because people tend to implicitly believe their status is earned, those with higher status believe that they are more competent, even when objective performance measures show that they are not. But second, because this inflated confidence leads others to infer competence, this overconfidence by the higher classes is a self-fulfilling belief.

I think that there are a few implications that translate to other confidence/competence situations like witness testimony.

Confidence Is the Goal

One of the main goals of witness preparation is to build confidence, and this research helps to explain why: Because confidence not only makes for more comfortable testimony, but is also more likely to be believed and is more likely to show that the witness knows what she is talking about. Confidence is an essential cue to credibility. As I’ve written before, the ways witnesses can show confidence is in trusting their own words, emphasizing what they’re certain about, focusing on the decision maker, and showing higher energy.

But Not False Confidence

But witnesses should not get carried away with the idea that even false or exaggerated confidence is beneficial. The difference between the study conditions and the conditions of testimony is a skilled cross-examiner. If there is one tool that’s especially effective in revealing a false confidence, that tool is effective cross-examination. Witnesses still need to avoid the pitfalls of coming across as arrogant, pretending to know something they don’t know, or talking over the decision-makers’ heads.

Lower Social Class Can be a Barrier

The study results show that the confidence-competence circle does not work for all social classes. As lead author Peter Belmi said in the ScienceDaily article, “These findings challenge the widely-held belief that everybody thinks they are better than average. Our results suggest that this type of thinking might be more prevalent among the middle and upper classes.” When members of lower social classes find themselves in the witness chair, they may face the barrier of lower self-expectations and will not have the habit of putting on a more confident front. As Belmi told the New York Times, “Not all class groups value ‘faking it until you make it’. I grew up in the Philippines with the idea that if you have nothing to say, just shut up and listen.” So if a key witness comes from a less individualistic culture or from a lower social class, additional work on their projected confidence is likely in order.

But High Social Class Can be a Two-Edged Sword

Being of the upper crust is an advantage since that overconfidence carries a credibility benefit. As the authors note in the article, “In social groups, overconfident individuals are particularly likely to speak up, use a confident and factual vocal tone, and exhibit a calm and relaxed demeanor, as a result, observers appraise overconfident individuals as competent and deserving of higher social rank.”

But an overconfidence due to perceived rank also carries a cost. In addition to the likelihood that the person merely appearing competent will get called on the ruse during cross-examination, there are also some other liabilities. For example, the study references some research showing that those at a higher social class tend to have greater levels of narcissism, believe they have greater power and control, and tend to think of themselves as better than average. Overconfidence can also lead to poor decision-making. As the New York Times reported, “The researchers said they hoped that the takeaway was not to strive to be overconfident.”

Good testimony requires confidence, but also requires a conscious awareness, an appreciation of risk, and a willingness to set aside false confidence and practice.

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Other Posts on Witness Credibility: 

• Instruct the Jury Accurately on Witness Credibility
• Rehabilitate Your Lying Witness
• Empower Your Witness: A Review of “Reinventing Witness Preparation”

Image credit: Created by the author