We often hear the word “epidemic” thrown around in terms of social afflictions or trends, but one particular behavior has risen in the wake of social media and a general inclination towards apathy that truly plagues how we interact with one another and with how we carry ourselves.
That epidemic is that of toxic confidence, a belief that self-assurance trumps qualifications and credentials. We see toxic confidence all around us all the time — in media, friendships, politics, classrooms, and more.
A recent New York Times article by Savannah Sobrevilla tackles the implications and roots of this social phenomenon, attributing it in part to the inclination of the newest generation of adults focusing, out of necessity due to the nature of our media, on the importance of selling the individuality of oneself, and the unabashed and unwavering self-confidence on which that rests.
However, a society full of individuals who all operate with manufactured omniscience only breeds misinformation, close-mindedness, and the subsequent disregard of information rooted in facts and expertise.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic wrote an article for Psychology Today about how the correlation between confidence and competence is weaker than one might assume, and weaker than Western culture often suggests. With a rise in baseless self-confidence to the point of this toxic confidence comes a subsequent rise in self-awareness, which translates to a narcissistic culture.
This narcissistic culture, Chamorro-Premuzic reminds us, is inherently one that harms women and is built on megalomania (an obsession with power and self-importance), which to me proves a default of androcentrism (a sole reliance on a masculine viewpoint).
“Our obsession with confidence over competence is such that we may even prefer overconfident to competent women, and overconfident to competent men,” Chamorro-Premuzic said. This is but a small way in which toxic confidence drowns out the voices of the experienced and qualified.
Queer author Ben Pechey wrote about toxic confidence in terms of prescribed limits on self-expression. Pechey wrote, in being praised for their confidence in their tendency towards what might seem to some as eccentric dress or deportment, “toxic confidence culture causes us to think of people in hierarchical ways, that some people are just more confident than us, and they will always have an edge.”
This tackles an interesting idea related to perception, with Pechey claiming that since every single person will perceive and understand you in a way that is specific to them, it is moot to focus incessantly on how one comes across, especially at the expense of substance.
At the core of this toxic confidence epidemic is truly the overreliance on perception. With this rise in toxic confidence, we have seen how the way things are said supersedes the content of one’s claims.
We see these so-called confidence men around us all the time, from politics to media. Sobrevilla used the example of actor Timothée Chalamet and his most recent role in the 2025 film “Marty Supreme”.
Sobrevilla pointed to Chalamet’s excessive confidence, referencing a recent comment from Chalamet in which he seemingly put down opera and ballet as lesser arts compared with film. The idea of “punching down” is a common yet unappealing aspect of the toxic confidence epidemic, regardless of its implications for silencing other voices and other forms of media in determining what is relevant and what is not.
While confidence is undeniably a valuable skill in success, it should never be the most important characteristic in determining legitimacy or reliability.
The claim that confidence equals competence is, in fact, a non sequitur. Charles Darwin once said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
Alaina Babb is a political science and media and communications studies major at Florida State University and a Senior Staff Writer for the Views section of the FSView & Florida Flambeau, the student-run, independent online news service for the FSU community. Email our staff at contact@fsview.com.
This article originally appeared on FSU News: When confidence outpaces competence
Reporting by Alaina Babb, Senior Staff Writer, FSView / FSU News
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