Reading the recent post here (http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/02/16/presenting-both-sides/) reminded me of a guy on tv who was spouting nonsense this morning.

One of the guests on the “Wright Stuff” on Channel 5 this morning (I was off work so had nothing better to watch) was talking about confidence.

As part of his raison d’être he claimed that studies showed children with high self esteem / self confidence did better academically and as a result of this, raising a childs self confidence will impove his or her academic performance. Now, if you find no problem with this then I suspect you really should stop reading now. (note, this is something often repeated – http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5263.html for example)
Before I go on, I am not trying to say people shouldnt raise children’s self confidence or that having a high self confidence is a bad thing. I am also not (at the moment) trying to disparage studies which use blatantly self-assessed values (like “happiness,” “self-confidence,” etc.)

My issue revolves almost totally around the causal effects here.

The man (never bothered to find out who he was) has assumed that A causes B and therefore doing more of A will mean more of B. In reality there is (based on his evidence) no way of knowing that.

Self confidence and self esteem are products of a persons sucess. If you are good at something, and praised for it, there is the tendency to become confident about doing it. Logic screams out that children who are academically sucessfull will be more self confident when questioned (as the questions are in an academic context and relate to academic type work) which in effect implies A does not cause B but is caused by B. The claims that improving a childs self confidence will mean they “do better in life” does not really hold true based on the evidence. If anything, improving self confidence without basing this on actual sucess is more likely to create a situation where the person will fall down spectacularly.

Sadly I no longer have the back issue and cant find it on the online search, but New Scientist did an article on this last year (or 2004) detailing research that had in fact identified improved self confidence was not a causal agent for sucess, and more often lead to bulying and arrogance.