The Confidence Factor: How Our Beliefs Shape Attitudes Towards Fairness and Redistribution

From school grades to workplace achievements, we often hear that confidence is key to success. But what if our belief in our performance doesn't just shape how we perform—it also influences how we treat others? Specifically, how does our confidence affect our views on fairness, inequality, and redistribution?

The Study: How Does Confidence Impact Social Preferences?

Our study, which is detailed in our recent working paper, builds on existing research in behavioral and experimental economics by asking a simple question: How do beliefs about our performance—our confidence—shape our preferences for fairness and redistribution?

We hypothesize that people who are more confident in their performance are less likely to support redistributing resources among others. This is because they might believe, possibly due to motivated reasoning, that those who perform well deserve their rewards, and those who don't should try harder. In essence, higher confidence could lead to more meritocratic—and less egalitarian—preferences.

The Experiment: Testing the Connection Between Confidence and Social Preferences

To test this hypothesis, we ran an online experiment with a representative sample of 800 participants across the United States. We manipulated their confidence through a simple feedback treatment that varied their beliefs about their performance on an analytical task.

The treatment was designed to manipulate two key dimensions of confidence—overestimation and overplacement—by shaping how participants assessed their performance, both in absolute terms ("overestimation") and relative to others ("overplacement"). After receiving feedback, participants were then asked to play a "spectator game," where they could redistribute money between two other participants ("workers") based on their performance.

Our goal was to measure how changes in confidence influence participants' willingness to redistribute money between two workers. Would more confident individuals be less inclined to redistribute resources to those perceived as lower performing? Specifically, we looked at the Extent of Redistribution, which reflects the difference between what is allocated to the lower-performing worker and the higher-performing worker, relative to the total amount available. This measure ranges from -1 (giving all to the best performer) to 1 (giving all to the lower performer).

Key Results: Confidence Reduces Support for Redistribution

Our results showed that confidence does, indeed, have a significant effect on social preferences. Participants who received a confidence treatment were less likely to redistribute money to the lower-performing worker, with a reduction of 0.14 standard

 deviations in the Extent of Redistribution. This suggests that even a subtle increase in confidence can make individuals less willing to support redistribution, and more inclined to adopt meritocratic fairness views.

We also aimed to disentangle the distinct roles of overestimation and overplacement in shaping these preferences. Overplacement had a stronger impact on reducing the Extent of Redistribution, underscoring how participants' perceptions of their relative performance influence their support for redistribution.

Moreover, baseline confidence and beliefs about the task—whether participants attributed performance to luck, effort, or skill—were important factors explaining how participants viewed the need for redistribution.

What Do These Findings Mean?

A key implication of this finding is its relevance to policy design, especially in contexts where confidence is influenced, such as education or the workplace. For example, in educational settings, practices like grade inflation can boost individual confidence. While this may lead to positive outcomes for students by increasing their self-esteem and perceived capabilities, it may also shape their views about societal fairness.

More generally, confidence appears to be a powerful driver of social preferences, with more confident individuals less willing to support redistribution. In this sense, meritocracy may breed its support among the winners, while simultaneously polarizing views of fairness between those who succeed and those who don’t.