What are the benefits of doubting ourselves?
Like shame and guilt, it often seems confounding to understand the purpose of these debilitating and unpleasant emotions, especially when in the midst of experiencing them firsthand.
One perspective informed by evolutionary psychology would posit that such emotions would not have evolved unless they had some utility sufficient to make their way into subsequent generations.
Our dichotomy of positive and negative emotions presupposes certain values contingent upon cultural context.
Anger is a suitable candidate as one of the more taboo emotions in modern civilized society. Even now I am putting my cultural biases on display – here in the Pacific Northwest, anger generally meets strong discouragement and disapproval – though it seems uncontroversial that anger underlies some of the more harmful behaviors in our society (I wrote more about how our anger matters here).
Yet, in a different time and place, anger was absolutely vital for survival. Let’s conjure up a plausible scenario: a thousand years ago on the battlefield during some tribal dispute, anger was instrumental in prevailing over one’s enemies, or dealing with would-be thieves, pirates and predators, human or otherwise.
Now, let’s take doubt. To restate the opening premise, what is the payoff for doubting ourselves?
The costs seem obvious enough. I imagine someone riddled with doubt takes fewer chances in life, gives up more easily, and consistently underperforms below their ability.
In my experience, there are fewer things more frustrating than feeling like one adequately prepared for a task then falling short when the moment is upon us.
As the ancient maxim from Archilocus goes, “We do not rise to the occasion, but fall to the level of our training.”
What then is the payoff of doubt?
In brief, doubt protects. People who doubt themselves are more careful and less prone to hubris and overweening pride. They likely make fewer mistakes, and are more able to hide in social situations by blending in. If we simply do not open our mouths, we cannot put our feet in them. On the one hand, if we have say the right thing and let the group know, we gain approval and increase our credibility as “the smart one.” On the other, the shame of saying the wrong thing while enduring perceived public humiliation is daunting. The pain of potential rejection is avoided entirely if we simply do not try. Another lens of looking at the benefit of self-doubt is a strategy for energy conservation or maintenance of positive self-identity. A particularly pernicious cycle occurs where someone demonstrating poor social calibration never receives direct or timely feedback – only indirectly through avoidance or eventually being ignored by the group. Evolutionarily speaking, group acceptance and belonging equated to individual survival, so the stakes are sufficiently high.
When it’s laid out like this, healthy doubt makes sense though it is suspect that it amounts to a particularly admirable life given our cultural worship of individual achievement. Indeed, in our current hyperconnected society, my view is that the potential upside far outweighs the downsides. And it’s not even close, despite the perceived phenomenological intensity of taking our shots and failing. While exile and social exclusion are hefty consequences, generally the most probable outcome is simply being ignored.
Let’s use YouTube as an example.
According to one source, approximately 700,000 hours of videos are uploaded onto YouTube every day.
And while that seems like an absurd amount of content, if we do the math it’s actually still a vanishingly tiny minority of users that create content. Various sources claim that while there are 2.5 billion monthly users, there are 38 million active channels and only 2 million channels signed up with the Partner Program that collects ad revenue.
My main takeaway is that even with the complete inundation of social media all around us for those that participate in modern society, the vast majority of us either have no interest or would rather spectate than create. I wonder how many among us consider putting ourselves out there but are instead cowed by our own doubts to even begin.
While I used YouTube to illustrate, I would wager similar disparities would show up among different media – whether it’s music, podcasting or writing.
So while there is a kind of self-protective “logic” to doubting ourselves, it behooves usto understand it and overcome it.