All Your Thoughts Are Self-Fulfilling Prophecies

From Shakespeare to The Secret, the idea that our thoughts and perceptions shape our reality is recognized as a powerful truth. As the Bard wrote, "[T]here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

While charlatans have long used this belief to promote bogus cancer cures and get-rich-quick schemes, psychologists are now actually beginning to understand how "faking it 'til you make it" — or alternatively, psyching yourself out with negative thinking — works in the social world. 

Two fascinating recent studies — one on confidence; the other exploring social fears — reveal how our own positive and negative stances work to alter our relationships and careers.

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Why Overconfidence Leads to Success

By Christine Dell'Amore / Source: National Geographic News

Believing you're better than you are may help you succeed, a new study says.

For years, psychologists have observed that people routinely overestimate their abilities, said study leader Dominic Johnson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.

Some experts have suggested that overconfidence can be a good thing, perhaps by boosting ambition, resolve, and other traits, creating self-fulfilling prophecies.

But positive self-delusion can also lead to faulty assessments, unrealistic expectations, and hazardous decisions, according to the study—making it a mystery why overconfidence remains a key human trait despite thousands of years of natural selection, which typically weeds out harmful traits over generations.
Now, new computer simulations show that a false sense of optimism, whether when deciding to go to war or investing in a new stock, can often improve your chances of winning.

"There hasn't been a good explanation for why we are overconfident, and this new model offers a kind of evolutionary logic for that," Johnson said. "It's unlikely to be an accident—we're perhaps overconfident for a good reason."

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