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So the study in question here is a very classic dramatic study.

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Is it me, Drew, or did they not make psychological studies the way they used to?

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They have all these review boards now and ethical considerations.

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Dude.

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They're kind of getting away.

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I feel like when you read about psych studies from the 50s and 60s, like there's crazy shit going on.

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The Milgram experiment.

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Dude, there's like fucking prison experiments and like snake experiments.

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Shocking people.

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Shocking people and making them thinking that they're torturing somebody.

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And the good old days.

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What happened to us?

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What happened?

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This one, they were at least trying to help people.

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No, this one is awesome.

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So what he did is he recruited a bunch of adults with life crippling phobias.

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So, I mean, we're talking phobias that was deeply interfering with their ability to just get by on a day to day basis.

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And in this case, it was people with extreme phobias of snakes.

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And so just to give listeners a sense of the extent of these phobias, you had people who change their routes to work because they didn't want to drive past a park.

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You had a woman who refused to had never worn a necklace in her life because necklaces reminded her of snakes.

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You had people who obsessively checked rooms and under furniture.

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Every single room they ever went into, they would have to obsessively check under all the furniture to confirm that there was not a snake in the room.

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Like hardcore phobias.

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And what's incredible is that the intervention that he designed, it involved no pills, no therapy, no visualizations, no mirror affirmations, definitely no fucking power poses.

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It was a simple intervention that he called guided mastery.

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And the process was really straightforward.

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First, they would watch through a window as he handled snakes.

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And after they got comfortable with him handling the snakes, he would simply invite them into the room.

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they didn't have to do anything they just had to step into the room once he got them into the room

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then he would invite them to touch simply touch a snake with thick gloves on once they were able

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to touch the snake with thick gloves he would invite them to take the glove off and then touch

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them again and then eventually he would get them holding the snakes in their laps putting it on

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themselves holding it and essentially within an afternoon he would take these people from

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crippling phobias to holding and handling snakes for an extended period of time.

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I know CBT and

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exposure therapy was kind of just getting off the ground around this same time.

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I mean, he called it

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guided mastery, but I read this and I was like, that's just exposure therapy, essentially.

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It's

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like you break off a little piece of the thing you're afraid of and you do that first and then

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you get a little bigger piece and then a little bigger piece and then eventually you're not afraid

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to do it at all.

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But that's a bit of an aside because the point here is not about fear.

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It's

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actually, you know, this is an episode about confidence.

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And this was the most stunning and

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unexpected finding that Bender have found, which was that when he followed up with these people

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who had the snake experience, they reported feeling more confident in other areas of their

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lives.

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They were more willing to speak up in meetings at work.

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They were more likely to ask

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for a raise.

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They were more confrontational with difficult people in their lives.

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They had a better

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time sticking to diets, sticking to routines, that basically the snake cure had kind of wide

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ranging subtle effects in other areas of their lives.

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As a specific example, like I mentioned

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the woman who never wore a necklace because it reminded her of snakes.

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Sure enough, after the

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experiment, she started wearing necklaces.

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And what's interesting is that nobody told her to

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wear necklaces.

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She just started wearing them.

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Now, the reason this experiment is important,

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the reason this whole concept of guided mastery is important, is that the Peale fallacy tells us

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believe in yourself first, then act.

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But what Bandura's research shows us is that you act first,

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then you start to believe in yourself.

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So confidence doesn't precede experience.

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It is produced by the experience.

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A simpler way to put this is that a feeling of confidence,

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an expectation of success or an ability to handle a situation, it is built through evidence.

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When

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you accumulate evidence in your life that you are able to handle certain things, then that is going

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to create a belief that you are able to handle subsequent things.

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If you've never handled anything

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difficult before and you try to believe that you can, you have no evidence to base that on.

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Yeah.

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Nobody came into that lab like, I want to be more confident in my life, right?

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They just

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came in to like solve a problem, but they had this crippling problem in their life and they wanted to

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come in and solve that problem.

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And they left being like, oh, I can solve problems now.

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And

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that kind of gave them a more, just a more confident outlook in life.

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What you're pointing

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at, I think is, is a very important pattern that we need to hammer on repeatedly throughout this

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episode, which is that generalizable confidence is not built in general.

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What happens is, is you

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build confidence in specific domains, specific contexts.

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And once you do that enough, it kind

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of bleeds out into the rest of your life.

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It's like a skill almost.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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And this is what

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Bandura found is that confidence is domain specific.

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You tend to only feel confident about

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the things that you have already accumulated evidence for that you've shown yourself that

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you can handle in your life.

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And then once you've shown yourself that you can handle that,

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you tend to feel confident in that specific domain, but you've also built evidence that

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you have handled something difficult before.

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Therefore, when confronted with other difficult

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things, you have a little bit more self-belief going into it.

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It starts specific and then it

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moves into the general, not the other way around.

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It's also related a little bit to the

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self-determination theory, which is another big theory in psychology that was came up by these

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two researchers, DC and Ryan.

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We've mentioned it before in a lot of different contexts, but it's a

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wide-ranging theory.

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One of the key points in that is that people who do seek, like,

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I want to be more confident and they seek ways to be more confident end up being not as confident

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when the people who just seek out competence in some domain, just like you're saying,

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they're the ones who end up being confident.

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It's a byproduct of all of it, right?

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It's not

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what they're seeking.

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They're just seeking competence.

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They don't really have confidence

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in mind at all.

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But then they come back and they're like, oh yeah, since I was able to do

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this thing.

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And I proved to myself I could do this thing.

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And I feel a little bit better about

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all these other things.

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You know what the irony of this, I want to come back to Norman Vincent

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Peale for a second.

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The irony is I imagine what happened.

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I've not studied his life closely,

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but he's in seminary school.

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He's terrified of public speaking.

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He's extremely anxious.

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He develops all these little tools and systems that get him up onto the pulpit and delivering

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sermons.

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It goes well.

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There was one domain in his life that he was particularly insecure about.

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He developed a handful of techniques that helped him accumulate that evidence that allowed him to be confident in that narrow context.

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And then once he became confident in that narrow context, it generalized a little bit across the rest of his life.

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But he drew the wrong conclusion from it.

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He looked at it and he said, oh, it must have been my affirmations and techniques that made me confident.

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Not, I got up and delivered a thousand sermons that made me confident.

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The solution was actually hiding in plain sight and he got the exact wrong lesson out of it.

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Yes, he did.

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Yeah.

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Bandura though, like he did have this specific framework around what he called self-efficacy.

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This isn't confidence, it's self-efficacy is what we're talking about.

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It's competence really is what it is, right?

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He said, what predicts whether somebody will attempt like a difficult task or try something difficult or something that's uncertain even too, right?

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Which is really what we're trying to do here with like when people are trying to be confident and then act, that's what they're trying to do.

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Act on something that's uncertain.

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He says that it's not about how you feel about yourself generally, but it's whether or not it's based on that actual evidence that they can actually execute those specific behaviors for a specific task.

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OK, so there's really three features that he highlighted out of this.

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It's it's not really a feeling that you have.

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It's more of just a belief that you can at least address whatever situation you're in.

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Not even necessarily that you're going to succeed.

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Just like, well, I can try this.

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Right.

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So it's not a feeling of, oh, I can definitely do this.

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It's just, let me give this a shot.

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Also, it's task specific as well.

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Okay.

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Like you were just saying, it's not, I have this general belief about myself that I can do anything.

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No, it's like, here's a thing in front of me.

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I can probably do this.

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Let me see if I can.

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This self-efficacy, this belief in yourself is evidence-based.

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It's not based on just some affirmation.

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It's based on experience.

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It's based on experience with a specific task.

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You've lived through it.

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You're not sitting at home putting post-it stickers on your bathroom mirror.

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You've actually gone out and done the thing a hundred times.

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So right there, you can just see the whole industry got it backwards, right?

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It was like, no, you have to act first and then you're going to feel like you can't actually do it, right?

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So if confidence starts with a domain specific experience, probably what happens for most people, right?

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It's like when we're when we hit adolescence, we become socially aware.

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We start measuring ourselves against others.

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And when you're a teenager, you haven't done a fucking thing.

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So of course, every nobody's confident.

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Everybody's highly insecure.

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and I feel like what happens for most people is that they develop competence around one thing

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when they're young that allows them to build confidence which then allows them to approach

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other challenges later on in their life congratulations you made it to the end of

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this clip this is actually part of a larger podcast episode and you can get access to the

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full episode right here

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Thank you.