Have you ever made a decision, only to find yourself second-guessing it moments later? Maybe you spoke in a meeting and immediately wondered if you said the wrong thing, or left a social gathering feeling confident, only to replay your actions in your head and feel uncertain. For many of us, reflecting on our choices isn’t always reassuring—sometimes it fuels self-doubt.
As a cognitive scientist, I am fascinated by this gap between what people also objectively know how confident they feel. Indeed, your confidence level can affect so many things – you either speak or act on your ideas, how much do you study for exams or stick to your decisions. And yet, how trust is developed or eroded can vary dramatically between people.
Two factors in particular can play a big role: stress and gender. People with higher stress levels They often report feeling less confident about their decisions than non-anxious people, even when their choices are just as accurate. Anxiety can make thoughts spiral: “What if I made the wrong choice?” “Did I miss something?” And these mental loops can erode trust over time.
Women, on the other hand, tend to report lower levels of self-confidence than men in a variety of tasks, despite performing equally well.
This is considered to arise from social and cultural factors. Feedback, expectations and stereotypes can subtly affect self-concept, making women more likely to underestimate their abilities.
Confidence over time
With these differences in mind, I began to wonder: if trust is shaped so differently by stress and gender, what happens when people take extra time to think about a decision? Does reflection help everyone, or can it push some people further into self-doubt?
pexels Mikhail Nilov, CC BY
To answer this, in our new studymy colleagues and I examined how participants performed different memory and visual discrimination tasks while rating their confidence after each response. By tracking how these ratings changed over time, we could see how confidence changes as people reflect on their decisions—and how those changes differ by gender and severity of anxiety symptoms.
What we found was that participants with higher anxiety didn’t just have low self-confidence – but that spending more time thinking made them even less confident. This happened even when their answers were correct.
For women, however, the extra reflection had the opposite effect. Careful review of the work allowed them to gradually feel more confident. Over time, this narrowed the usual confidence gap between women and men, until both sexes were equally confident in their decisions.
In short, the same behavior—reflecting a decision—was found to have the opposite effect, depending on the factor (gender or stress) that made a person feel underconfident in the first place.
Because this matters
So why does longer thinking produce such different results? For anxious people, it seems that longer reflection time can become ruminative, reinforcing worries and imaginary mistakes. Whereas for women, reflection can be constructive, allowing for careful consideration of evidence and performance.
This distinction underscores a simple but powerful point: confidence isn’t about how long you think—it’s about how you think. In other words, the meeting that carefully evaluates the evidence can boost trust, while rumination can erode it.
So what does this mean for future decision-making?
Well, if you tend to worry, it’s not always better to think more. Limit rumination, focus on specifics and set clear decision rules to prevent your confidence from plummeting.
And if you’re a woman and tend to underestimate your abilities, taking some time to review the facts and results may well help your self-confidence more closely reflect reality.
And what, you ask, if I’m also a woman and I have anxiety — how do I respond? Well, that will depend on which of your biases are more dominant, stress-related or gender-related.
And if the two are similar, then your lack of confidence may stay the same over time: not getting better, but also not getting worse. For you, it may be worth trying both decision-making methods in a low-stakes situation to see which one works best for you.
The bottom line, however, is that there is no one-size-fits-all rule such as “stop overthinking” or “think more carefully” when it comes to decision-making.
Instead, you should focus on being aware of how your emotional and social habits of mind shape your confidence levels so you can make better choices and trust yourself when it’s warranted to do so. This can help turn reflection from a source of doubt into a tool of confidence.
This article was commissioned as part of a collaboration between
Videnskab.dk and The Discussion. You can read the Danish version of this article here.
