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Have you ever made a decision, only to find yourself second-guessing it moments later? Maybe you spoke up 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 doesn’t always reassure — sometimes it fuels self-doubt.
As a cognitive scientist, I am fascinated by this gap between what people objectively know and how confident they feel. Indeed, your level of confidence can affect so many things – whether you speak up or act on your ideas, how much you study for an exam or stick with your decisions. And yet, the way confidence develops — or erodes — can vary dramatically between people.
Two factors in particular can play a big role: anxiety and gender. People with higher levels of anxiety 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 confidence over time.
Women, on the other hand, tend to report lower confidence levels than men across a variety of tasks, despite performing equally well.
This is thought to arise from social and cultural factors. Feedback, expectations and stereotypes can subtly influence self-perception, making women more likely to underestimate their abilities.
Confidence over time
With these differences in mind, I began to wonder: if confidence is shaped so differently by anxiety and gender, what happens when people spend extra time thinking about a decision? Does reflection help everyone, or might it push some people further into self-doubt?
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To answer this, in our new study, my colleagues and I looked at how participants performed different memory and visual discrimination tasks, while rating their confidence after each answer. By tracking how these ratings changed with elapsed time, we could see how confidence changes as people reflect on their decisions — and how these changes differ depending on gender and the severity of anxiety symptoms.
What we found was that participants with higher anxiety were not just underconfident — but that spending more time thinking made them even less sure of themselves. This happened even when their answers were correct.
For women, however, extra reflection had the opposite effect. Carefully reviewing the task allowed them to gradually feel more confident. Over time, this reduced the usual confidence gap between women and men, until both genders were equally certain in their decisions.
In short, the same behaviour — reflecting on a decision — was found to have the opposite effect depending on what factor (gender or anxiety) made a person feel underconfident in the first place.
Why this matters
So why does thinking longer produce such different outcomes? For anxious people, it seems that longer reflection time can become ruminative, amplifying worries and imagined errors. While for women, reflection can be constructive, allowing careful consideration of evidence and performance.
This distinction highlights a simple but powerful point: confidence isn’t about how long you think — it’s about how you think. In other words, deliberation that carefully evaluates evidence can boost confidence, while rumination can erode it.
So what does this mean for future decision-making?
Well, if you tend to be anxious, more thinking isn’t always better. Limit rumination, focus on concrete evidence and set clear decision rules to prevent your confidence from spiralling downward.
And if you you’re a woman and you tend to underestimate your abilities, taking some time to review the evidence and outcomes may well help your confidence better reflect reality.
And what, you might ask, if I’m both a woman and have anxiety — how will I respond? Well, that would depend on which of your biases are more dominant, anxiety-related or gender related.
And if the two are similar, then your underconfidence might stay the same over time: not getting better, but also not worsening. For you, it might be worth trying out both ways of decision-making in a low-stakes situation to see which serves you better.
The bottom line, though, is that there’s no one-size-fits-all rule like “stop overthinking it” or “think more carefully” when it comes to decision-making.
Instead, you should focus on being aware of how your mind’s emotional and social habits shape your levels of confidence, so you can make better choices and trust yourself when it’s justified to do so. This can help turn reflection from a source of doubt into a tool for self-assurance.
This article was commissioned as part of a partnership between
Videnskab.dk and The Conversation. You can read the Danish version of this article here.
Sucharit Katyal received a fellowship from Koa Health.
