This article was from yesterday's Sunday Times, and jointly written with Lord David Owen (link with paywall: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-putins-mind-absolute-power-has-blinded-russias-new-tsar-q8gws3v5j)
 

Authority, Confidence and Gender in the Post-Pandemic World with Ian Robertson and Mary Ann Sieghart

Date
Thursday 24 June 2021
Time
12.00 noon - 1.00pm (BST)
8.00pm – 9.00pm (JST)
Check the time in your location

Booking Details
Free – Donations Welcome
Registration essential

The activities of the Japan Society are made possible thanks to the support of its members. This event is free of charge and open to all. We realise that this is a difficult time for many people. However, if you are planning to attend and do not have a membership subscription as an individual or through your employer, please consider making a donation. You can find details of membership and how to join the Japan Society community here.

Following a series of webinars over the past year on the post-pandemic workplace and gender equality in Japan and the UK (*), Bill Emmott is joined by two well-known and distinguished guests to examine the psychological background notably for gender inequality but also for other management challenges: a scientist, Ian Robertson, and commentator, Mary Ann Sieghart.

When former prime minister and Japan Olympics Committee chair Yoshiro Mori made his notoriously offensive remarks accusing female board members of “talking too much” one of his associated sins was that of being wholly unoriginal. The notion he aired has been heard all around the world, along with other prejudices that continue to prevent managements from finding the full potential in their workforces, especially women. The deep-rooted nature of the problem is why Mary Ann Sieghart researched and wrote her new book, The Authority Gap: Why women are taken less seriously than men – and what we can do about it. Behind the issue of whether women are taken less seriously stands the question central to Ian Robertson’s new book: How Confidence Works. Why, he asks, do studies find that on average women are less confident (and behave less confidently) than men, even when they have equivalent skills and experience?

As companies in the UK and Japan grapple with new questions of how their offices and management styles might change post-COVID, they also need to think through how long-standing issues of gender equality and professional development can be addressed, and whether new working arrangements can be made to help these issues or might they harm them. What encouragement and guidance can be given to the next generations of both women and men entering or developing their careers in Japan and the UK about how to build up confidence, to counter unconscious bias and to overcome “the authority gap”?

And before that, how can our schools and universities equip students with the skills they will need to hold their own as they enter the workforce?

* Recordings of previous Japan Society webinars can be found via the following links:

• Work During and After the Pandemic
• The Pandemic and Its Impact on Gender Equality
• Japan’s Far More Female Future

Professor Ian Robertson is a neuroscientist and trained clinical psychologist. He is  is Co-Director of the Global Brain Health

The Psychologist editor Jon Sutton hears from Professor Ian Robertson about his new book, plus an extract. 

The new book by Ian Robertson, Professor of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin, is How Confidence Works: The new science of self-belief, why some people learn it and others don’t. It is published by Bantam Press on 3 June, and our editor asked Ian about it. Plus an extract, on status seeking.

The book kicks off with tennis legend Venus Williams’ view that confidence is something that can be worked on every day, like going to the gym or training. Is there research from Psychology to back up that idea, that we can learn to be confident?

Yes there is, across the board in fact, in domains ranging from sport to ageing and anxiety management to work performance. Take cycling for example, where you can measure endurance by asking people to pedal until they are so exhausted they can’t continue. Young fit men and women did this in one study and cycled for an average 10 minutes before having to stop. Then half of them were taken aside by the researchers and taught to use confidence-enhancing self-talk phrases. For example, they learned to say you're doing well, feeling good, or push through this. They then had to say these phrases to themselves while doing their next exhaustion test a few days later. The self-talk group boosted their endurance by 18%, from around 10.5 to 13 minutes. They  also felt less strain during the exercise than the other group, whose endurance-time didn't change at all⁽¹⁾.

In another study, researchers increased the grip strength of older people – an excellent predictor of mortality – by giving them confidence-enhancing false feedback about their percentile performance in a pretest. And they also felt much younger than their true age compared to a control group⁽²⁾. 

Treatment success for anxiety disorders has been found to be mediated by self-efficacy, with changes in symptoms trailing improvements in self-efficacy, but not vice versa⁽³⁾. And a 2019 study in Nature⁽⁴⁾ showed academic performance can also be improved by a single web-based session providing the evidence that intellectual abilities are changeable, not fixed and can improve in response to effort, learning new strategies, or asking for help. The effect was particularly strong for the low-achieving pupils, with their confidence in their ability to learn enhanced by learning that their abilities were not fixed. 

Our cover feature this month is about a very visual representation of that confidence boost… the ‘power pose’.

Yes… that early finding, that an expansive, confident-looking power pose made people feel more confident, didn’t replicated well⁽⁵⁾. But the apparent discrediting of ‘power posing’ as a confidence-booster was tempered by a 2020 review of all the studies on posture by Aarhus University researchers. They confirmed indeed that expanding your body in space with wide stance or spread-out shoulders and arms doesn’t raise confidence much at all. However, they did conclude that shrinking your posture with folded arms, bowed head, hunched posture and folded legs diminished peoples’ confidence quite significantly⁽⁶⁾. So, learning to change posture can contribute to higher confidence – as can many other methods across most domains of human activity. For example, women’s confidence in their ability benefits from adopting an ‘implementation mindset’ where they are focused on delivering on clear selected goal, compared to a ‘deliberative mindset’ where they are musing over the pros and cons of a range of potential personally-relevant goals⁽⁸⁾. 

You call confidence ‘a bridge to the future’, ‘at the core of what makes things happen’, by combining ‘can do’ about the inner world with ‘can happen’ about the external world. Presumably that bridge can lead to bad places too?

Indeed it can, so let’s take one example. Adam Neumann, former CEO of WeWork, believed that his company’s meteoric rise and scale could solve the world’s biggest problems and told the New York magazine that he needed the largest possible valuation of his company so that he could provide help with issues of global warfare, saying: ‘There are 150 million orphans in the world. We want to solve this problem and giv

My interview with Claire O'Connell of the Irish Times is published here:

The early 20th century was the era of physics and the second half was era of biology and amazing genetics. Now the 21st century is the era of the mind. We are escaping the curse of biological determinism, that over-emphasis on “hardware”. We are rediscovering the software, the role that the mind plays in our bodies and behaviour.

What have you seen happen in your area of research?

When I studied psychology, I was brought up to believe that we lost brain cells after childhood and the central nervous system could never regenerate. The big change since then is the discovery that we can form new connections between brain cells in adulthood, and even grow new neurons.

In tandem with that, there is more of an understanding that our education and experiences can shape almost every process in the brain, and that we can decide systems of living which will shape our minds and our bodies.

What research from your career to date makes you most proud?

We know from population studies that high levels of education and social engagement are linked to a reduced risk of developing dementia in older age. Our research at Trinity College Dublin found a connection with noradrenaline, a brain chemical involved in stress and attention.

Education, positive social interaction and optimal stress levels mean that noradrenaline fosters more connections in the brain, and it also seems to protect against the effects of damage seen in Alzheimer’s disease.

And we now believe you can change the activity in a part of the brain called the locus coeruleus, which makes noradrenaline, by meditating and controlling your breathing.

Do you practise mindfulness and breathing?

Yes, I have been meditating for several years and I find it fascinating that we have discovered a potential mechanistic connection between the breath and brain. It’s something we can do every day and I think particularly at the moment it’s important to know that we can have that positive effect on our health.

Speaking of which, how has your pandemic been so far?

Before all this I used to travel quite a bit with work, but for more than a year now I have been at home in Dalkey. It has been a joy – our daughter and her family have been staying with us throughout, and we get to spend all this time with our young grandson. It is a privilege to be part of his life.

Your latest book is coming out shortly. It’s about confidence – why that subject?

My wife, Dr Fiona O’Doherty, is a clinical psychologist and ever since we met - 39 years ago she has always talked to me about how confidence is key. She suggested I write a book about confidence, that human ability to envisage something that doesn’t yet exist and then work to create that thing.

Confidence differs from optimism and self-esteem, in that it is linked to action, with the brain chemical dopamine underpinning the feeling of reward at mastering a challenge.

Any quick hacks to kick-start that confidence?

Set goals to get to where you want to go, especially small goals just outside your comfort zone, and succeeding in those goals drives further success.

• How Confidence Works: The new science of self-belief, why some people learn it and others don’t by Ian Robertson will be published on June 3rd

Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean  Maya Angelou
Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured Mark Twain

2020 has been a challenging time for everyone because change is unsettling and being cut off from other people and our normal routines can be stressful.

* Here are some short films illustrating some of the points I make in the following blog:  overload , anger,  anxiety, relaxation, hunger and overeating

But there is a potential upside too. When everything changes, we can't rely on routine and habit anymore. And while that can make us anxious, it also gives us an opportunity to have a bit of a tidy up – maybe even a spring clean – of the huge cluster of emotions, thoughts