The Seba library treats Confidence in 9 passages, across 7 authors (including Miller, William R., Dennett, Stella, Margaret Graver).
A common purpose that runs through all the methods just outlined is for the client to speak about ways in which change can occur, about confidence: why and how he or she could succeed with change.
Miller defines confidence as a specific species of change talk in MI — a client’s voiced self-efficacy regarding the possibility of successful change — and prescribes targeted reflective strategies to strengthen it.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013thesis
Situation 3 is at least temporarily a demoralizing one. The perceived importance of change is high but confidence is low. ‘I’ll try’ is one sign of being in this cell.
Miller maps confidence onto a two-axis grid of importance and ability, showing that low confidence produces a characteristic demoralizing clinical presentation even when motivation is otherwise present.
, Motivational Interviewing: Helping People Change, Third Edition, 2013thesis
Wilson (2005) believed that ‘sociologists and psychologists who would restore self-confidence had been mistaken. God-confidence was the thing, not self-confidence’.
Dennett, via Wilson and Jungian psychology, frames the recovery of confidence as necessarily transpersonal — a restoration of the ego-Self axis rather than a reinforcement of ego-identified self-trust.
, Individuation in Addiction Recovery: An Archetypal Astrological Perspective, 2025thesis
knowledge may make a person more confident in specific situations, but confidence is not the same thing as knowledge and is also necessary.
Graver, reading Plato through Stoic categories, distinguishes confidence (tharros) from knowledge, arguing it constitutes a necessary but morally ambiguous affective component of courage.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007thesis
A minor but not uninteresting problem arises in connection with the Status of Confidence in Stoic Classifications.
Graver flags confidence as a theoretically anomalous term within Stoic emotional taxonomy, warranting dedicated inquiry into how it fits the schema of eupatheia and pathe.
, Stoicism and Emotion, 2007supporting
confidence in your intuitions is only weakly predictive of whether they are good or not: ‘while confidence in one’s intuitions vis-à-vis a particular task at hand may bear some relation to actual intuition performance, the predictive validity is likely low.’
McGilchrist mobilizes empirical research to show that felt confidence in one’s intuitive judgments is epistemologically unreliable, a finding he deploys against reductionist dismissals of intuition.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021supporting
The taboos on feelings of tenderness, sympathy, and confidence can be just as great in some neurotics as the taboos on hostility and vindictiveness are in others.
Horney identifies confidence as an affect subject to neurotic prohibition, revealing that its suppression — like suppressed hostility — produces an impoverished rather than distorted emotional life.
, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self-Realization, 1950supporting
Someone told me one day that he felt full of joy and confidence when he had been to confession. Someone else told me that he was still afraid.
Pascal observes that confidence and fear coexist as complementary spiritual states, implying that a complete soul requires both rather than the triumph of one over the other.
, Pensées, 1670supporting
A high strength of evidence reflects high confidence that the evidence reflects the true effect. Further research is very unlikely to change our confidence in the estimate of effect.
McPheeters employs confidence in its strictly technical, evidence-grading sense — as a measure of evidentiary reliability — with no psychological or depth-psychological resonance.
, Pharmacotherapy for Adults With Alcohol Use Disorder in Outpatient Settings: Systematic Review, 2023aside