Bayesianism and self-doubt

Self-confidence and performance: A little self-doubt helps

Objectives: To test the hypothesis that a decrease in confidence on a well-learned task will increase effort and performance. Design: A 2 (group: control, experimental) 2 (trial: practice, competition) mixed-model with repeated measures on the second factor. Method: Expert skippers’ (n 1⁄4 28) self-confidence was reduced via a combination of task (i.e., change of rope) and competitive demands. ...

Faith, Hope and Doubt

Bayesianism and Language Change

Bayesian probability is normally defined over a fixed language or event space. But in practice language is susceptible to change, and the question naturally arises as to how Bayesian degrees of belief should change as language changes. I argue here that this question poses a serious challenge to Bayesianism. The Bayesian may be able to meet this challenge however, and I outline a practical meth...

Possible Selves and Self-Doubt: A Poverty of Desired Possibility

Three studies tested whether self-doubt stems more from the absence of a strong desired self or the presence of a strong undesired self. Across studies, participants completed individual difference measures and then imagined a desired, neutral, or undesired possible self and completed strength measures for the imagined possible self. As predicted, compared to low selfdoubt participants, high se...

Fear of self, doubt and obsessive compulsive symptoms.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Following observations in the literature that obsessions often contain or imply negative evaluative information about the self, Aardema et al. (2013) recently developed a measure of feared-self relevant to OCD. The current study aimed to provide further examination of the relevance of such feared self-beliefs to obsessive compulsive processes - in particular whether th...