Self-Confidence and Social Interactions

This paper studies the interactions between an individual's self-esteem and his social environment, whether in the workplace, at school, or in personal relationships. A person generally has only imperfect knowledge of his own ability (or long-term payoff) in pursuing a task, and will undertake it only if he has sufficient self--confidence. People who interact with him (parent, spouse, friend, teacher, manager, colleague, etc.) often have complementary information about his ability, but also a vested interest in his completing the task. This generates an incentive for such principles to distort their signals so as to manipulate the agent's self-confidence.