A long, long time ago is everything that’s ever happened in the whole world before breakfast. It’s called history,” the narrator says in “The History Badge”, an episode of children’s TV staple Hey Duggee.

He’s not wrong. We wake up every morning to history being made and being made up before our very eyes.

It wasn’t even two weeks ago that Dominic Cummings, adviser to the prime minister and obviously a big Hey Duggee fan, made his infamous address in the Rose Garden of Number 10 where he outlined a story of his travels to Durham and back, which any book editor would reject as too outlandish. He is even said to have edited his own blog to make it look as though he predicted the current pandemic, leading one commentator to quip, “History will be kind to Dominic Cummings, for he intends to rewrite it.”

There is no doubting Mr Cummings’ self-confidence. How do people get to be that confident? Where does confidence end and chutzpah start? And, at the other end of the scale, where does confidence start and feelings of inadequacy end?

If you know your stuff and are good at it, you should be confident in your own abilities. Right? Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Self-confidence and self-efficacy are two very different things (see pages 16-19). How many really clever people lack confidence? And how many of the not-so-smart have it by the bucketful? I’ve known academics renowned for being top scholars in their field who have lacked confidence. Because sometimes, of course, the more you know, the more it highlights how much is still out there that you don’t know. And in that questioning space, imposter syndrome lurks menacingly.

Much confidence can be down to environment and context. For example, if you are in a room full of historians, as a scientist you can feel pretty secure in the superiority of your scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, in a fascinating experiment in the US, one group of college students were told a test was for high-school students and another group told that it was for Ivy Leaguers. No prizes for guessing which group approached the test with more confidence.

Of course, when asked a question, the confidence with which you give your answer will depend whether you are in a crowded place or a one-to-one environment or even when no one is present.

It’s those who thrive in the last who have produced one of the most heartening stories of the current crisis. The necessity for remote learning has highlighted the flourishing of those unassuming students who don’t stand out in class, who neither put their hand up to answer questions nor cause any disruption or distraction. Unkindly dubbed “grey students” or “wallpaper students”, they are thriving in this new world and they are shining bright.

They may not be self-confident, but they know what they can achieve, just not in a loud, showy way. This is self-efficacy - the belief in your own ability to succeed in specific situations or accomplish a task. If they want something, they keep going and never give up, even when the odds are seemingly against them. Often they achieve it. We never see the many unsuccessful chapters in the stories of the successful people.

So, we must be careful not to be blinded by confidence - particularly when it concerns our politicians and their aides. While they may be attempting a “mind-bendingly high” difficulty level like Betty the octopus in the Hey Duggee episode “The Crazy Golf Badge”, with her “complex vortex” golf hole, it might be the quiet ones, like Duggee himself, who are really going to make history.

@AnnMroz

This article originally appeared in the 5 June 2020 issue under the headline “In a world full of overconfident chancers, isn’t it time for Duggee?”