Sports psychologists describe self-confidence as "an athlete's expectation of success," but what I find more interesting is its relationship to what cognitive psychologists call anchoring.
Normally, anchoring (or what some folks call focusing) is seen as a negative trait. It's our heavy reliance on one piece of information, while ignoring all the others.
Take the peculiar case of Kurt Warner.
Back in 1994, on a sunny August day, Kurt Warner was cut by the Green Bay Packers. It should have been the end of this story. By any fair measure Warner should have left football.
After all, Warner only got to start during his senior season at Northern Iowa. This is one of those insult to injury things since Northern Iowa is not a school known for its football prowess or much else for that matter.
Nor did he receive an invite to the 1994 scouting combine (which is where pro scouts assess want to be pro players) and while the Packers signed him as an undrafted free agent, that signing lasted three week, during which time he got to throw fourteen passes.
Then he was cut.
His next job was as a stock boy in a grocery story. He kept that job until an Arena League football coach invited him to the Iowa Barnstormers free agent camp.
He led the Barnstormers to two Arena league football championships, was signed by the St. Louis Rams, who he led to two Superbowls (winning one), and then he got hurt and was-yup, you guessed it-unceremoniously replaced by Marc Bulger.
And again Warner should have left football. Again he stayed. Healing from injury, bouncing among teams, warming the bench, serving as a backup, biding his time. Again that grit paid off. Next weekend he'll lead the Arizona Cardinals against the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Superbowl.
You may have heard some of this before. Warner's story is one of those that sports journalists love to tell for the sheer improbability of it. And with the Superbowl less than a week away, it's getting plenty of play.
What is getting less attention is a little comment Warner made in an ESPN interview about why he stayed in football after getting cut by Green Bay.
"I saw that I was as accurate as Brett Farve in practice and my feel for the pro-game was natural. The playbook didn't overwhelm me, either. Even though I was a nobody, I never sensed I didn't belong."
In Warner's case his anchor was that he was an accurate passer-as accurate as Brett Farve.
Now, especially back in 1994, the one thing we can be certain of is this: Warner was by no means as accurate a passer as Brett Farve.
In 1994, Farve was one year away from winning his first Superbowl and one year away from his first (of three) MVP awards. This aside, Warner's comparisons were based on the 14 passes he threw in practice. Was he living in a fantasy land of accuracy somehow turned into a reality?
This raises some interesting questions about overconfidence and what cognitive psychologists describe as our biases. Anchoring is one such example, so is ‘confirmation bias'-the fact that we tend to process information so the stuff that supports our earlier biases is confirmed and everything else is thrown out. The list goes on. We have a number of such blinders and they're all ways that we lie to ourselves while making decisions.
But what happens when the decisions we make turn out to be the right ones, even though the entire cognitive process underlying these decisions is wrong?
Columbia Business School's Eric Johnson pointed out (when I called to ask him the same question) that there's a whole other level of bias at work here. "There's a lot of noise when it comes to evaluating talent," says Johnson, "and I'm sure the Green Bay coaches had some sort of confirmation bias of their own. Warner came from a no-name school, he barely played, they probably assumed he wasn't any good."
So both anchors were incorrect, but somehow both led Warner to what is now without question a Hall of Fame career. Which goes a long way towards explaining why cognitive psychology is an excellent tool for modeling the brain, and an occasionally wildly ineffective tool for modeling reality.
