Can confidence influence persuasiveness in disagreements by conveying competence versus dominance? The moderating role of competitiveness

• Main Authors: REES, Laura, TSAI, Ming-hong, KOPELMAN, Shirli, HU, Hsiu-Hua
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2024
• Subjects: Confidence; Competence; Competitiveness; Dominance; Persuasiveness; Personality and Social Contexts; Social Psychology
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3942; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/5200/viewcontent/ncmr_747_rees.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Research has demonstrated that confident individuals gain social influence because their confidence signals competence rather than dominance in settings in which they do not experience a disagreement with others. We extend this research by exploring felt competitiveness, as reflected by perceptions of goal opposition between perceivers and others. In settings where people experience a disagreement, we explore the impact of felt competitiveness on the association between expressed confidence and social perceptions of the expresser’s competence and dominance, and how these shape persuasiveness. We conducted a field study examining dyadic interactions between coworkers (Study 1) and two experimentsmanipulating competitiveness and confidence (Studies 2-3). Results showed that high competitiveness neutralizes the positive association between expressed confidence and perceived competence, thus eliminating the positive indirect effect of expressed confidence on persuasiveness. Results also demonstrated a stronger positive association between expressed confidence and perceived dominance when competitiveness is higher. However, perceived dominance did not consistently predict persuasiveness, suggesting that the dominance results should be interpreted with caution. Overall, our findings offer novel implications regarding how the social influence processes of confidence expressions are shaped by felt competitiveness.