Science News

You know it's tough out there when fashion and beauty executives think that even a model's body isn't good enough to sell clothes or that a celebrity's natural face isn't up to par, even with makeup.

New research from the University of Warwick shows that a woman's confidence clearly affects her ability to perform basic spatial tasks...

The trouble, says Kahneman, is that we're often confident in our intuitive judgments even when we have no idea what we're doing. And to make matters worse, we tend to evaluate the reliability of other people's decision making on the same basis - if they're confident, they must know what they're talking about.

A bulk of research shows that when people are put in situations where they are expected to fail, their performance does plummet. They turn into different people. Their head literally shuts down, and they end up confirming the expectations.

An Indiana University of Pennsylvania sociologist's study of mixed martial arts competitors found that these men have unique ways of managing fear that actually allow them to exhibit confidence.

The study discovers how the differences in the way men and women think of themselves and react to incentives may be creating gender differences that lead to leadership gaps, rather than the gap being caused solely by discrimination in the selection process. Specifically men's tendency to exhibit natural overconfidence in their past performances may attribute to the lack of greater female representation in upper management and executive positions.