Why Do Confident People Get So Much Hate?

Why are successful people who are publicly confident so polarizing?

I never thought about this question before the 2024 Olympic Games. I was so impressed by track-and-field sprinter Noah Lyles, who appeared to be his own personal hype-man. He clinched the gold in the men’s 100 and 200 meters at the 2023 World Championships, which only four other sprinters have ever done.

In June on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Lyles shared his Olympic ambition to win four gold medals, which no one had ever done before: “Everybody knows Usain Bolt. . . . Yeah, I want to be faster than that. . . . Now you’re going on to Mount Rushmore, now you’re the greatest of the great.”

Bold words, but I loved it! I was inspired by his work ethic. Many people, however, were rooting against his success at the Olympics, as suggested by social media comments like “I love team USA but I can’t stand this guy” and “Praying he loses so he will be quiet.”

Sports is not the only arena where this backlash occurs, but it provides an interesting space to explore the question of why publicly confident people can generate mixed reactions. Not only can success in sports be objectively measured in times, touchdowns, points, batting averages, scores, goals, blocks, etc., it’s also an industry where confidence is encouraged because of its link to athletic performance, potential to intimidate the competition, and of course sheer entertainment value.

So what dictates too little, just enough, or too much confidence? When does it motivate us, and when do we feel the need to hate on people who are publicly confident? Perhaps the answer to this Goldilocks conundrum has more to do with us than them.

Comparing ourselves to others

We develop our identity (who we are) and self-concept (what we believe about ourselves) through various processes, one of which is social comparison. Social comparisons involve evaluating and judging ourselves in relation to both known and unknown others. It’s a habitual and automatic process that largely operates at the subconscious level.

What we are cognizant of at the conscious level are the emotional effects of that comparison. The emotional effects can vary depending on if it’s an upward comparison, where we perceive the person to be better off than us, or a downward comparison, where we perceive ourselves to be better off. While not always, upward comparisons tend to elicit negative emotions (frustration, envy, discouragement) and downward comparisons more positive emotions (gratitude, hope, happiness).

Hearing an athlete speak confidently about their past or predicted future success would likely trigger an upward social comparison. For upward comparisons, psychologists suggest there are three common responses: inspiration, benign envy, and malicious envy.

Inspiration is when you view the person’s success as positive and motivating for your own personal circumstances. In contrast, feelings of benign envy may start out as frustration, but produce a similar impact as inspiration, motivating you to reach a comparable level of achievement as the person. Malicious envy, on the other hand, never moves past the negative emotions and can play out as an attempt to lessen the status of the other person through criticism, condemnation, or denigration. Australians refer to it as “tall poppy syndrome,” where people are attacked for their success and achievements, essentially cutting down the tall poppy.

One form of envy encourages us to rise to the level of the upward comparison, while the other compels us to cut them down, but both involve an effort to protect our own self-concept.

Consider how we respond to underdogs. Oh, how we love a classic underdog story! The plight of someone defying the odds stacked against them, determined to be successful. While underdogs in sports may be far superior athletes to us, they elicit emotional responses similar to downward comparisons, like hope and sympathy. This happens largely because many of us identify with underdogs, recalling when the odds were stacked against us at one point or another in our lives. Symbolically, underdogs represent our belief or hope in a meritocracy.

But what happens to public opinion when our underdog becomes a top dog? There are many examples of this in sports. Take Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo, who has as classic an underdog story as any. He was born into a working-class family, where his mother worked seven days a week as a cleaner and a cook to buy soccer shoes for him as a kid. When he was 15, he was diagnosed with a potentially career-ending heart condition. Ronaldo was a public darling when he was signed to Manchester United in 2003, but as his competence, career, and confidence grew, public opinion shifted for some. An analysis of Premier League players who received the greatest number of abusive tweets between August 2021 and January 2022 found that Ronaldo topped the list with a whopping 12,520!

Motivate or “hate”

So what determines which path we take when faced with upward comparisons?

One factor has to do with our perception of how much control we have over our lives, or our self-efficacy: our belief in our capacity to meet our goals. There are many factors that influence our self-efficacy—for example, experiencing success and failure as a child or adult, having or not having supportive people in our networks who encourage us, and seeing or not seeing people similar to us succeed.

I mentioned that I was inspired by Lyles. To be clear, I will never be able to run as fast as him, even if a locomotive engine was pushing me, but I can run my own race, within the lane of my profession, and strive for excellence. That was what he sparked for me, as did so many other Olympic athletes. I’m also someone who has a high level of self-efficacy. As opposed to negative feelings, when I heard him speak confidently about his intentions, I was inspired.

For benign envy, although we may not like someone’s success, when we feel we can control our own destiny, we are more likely to be motivated to level up. But we are at risk of choosing the path of malicious envy when we feel we have less control over our life outcomes.

The other factor affecting our response has to do with how we see the other person: our beliefs about how much they deserve their success. When we feel that the person deserves the success, even if it’s frustrating to us, we are more likely to be motivated by it than to try to cut them down.

It can’t be overlooked that deservingness is at play in criticism of successful people who seem to have benefitted from privilege to get to where they are. This has been a longtime point of contention with Division I college athletes, for example, who not only get the best athletic training, coaching, and resources in college, but also (for some) made it there thanks to costly private schools and club teams in high school, a double layer of privilege. Indeed, data collected by The Flat Hat, a College of William & Mary student publication, highlighted that on average athletes at the College came from “more socioeconomically privileged backgrounds” than non-athlete students.

However, other times, perceptions of deservingness are really about bias. For example, Black male athletes in general are stereotyped as being more arrogant and less hard-working than white male athletes. Thus, a confident Black male athlete is more likely to be perceived as arrogant and their success undeserved. Shannon Sharpe, former tight end and former co-host of the Fox Sports Show Undisputed, commented about the racial bias in sports, using Tom Brady as an example: “There’s no possible way that a Black quarterback could do some of the things that Tom Brady did and get away with it. But here again, I say sports are a microcosm of society…”

Female athletes don’t fare any better in biased perceptions of deservingness, especially if their athleticism and confidence rub up against socially constructed scripts of what it means to be a woman.

Haters don’t gotta hate

There’s an opportunity for us the next time we feel compelled to criticize someone who is publicly confident: Ask ourselves why. Is this person doing harm to others? Is there a lack of concrete evidence of their success? Or does their confidence make us feel uncomfortable? The last question is a hard one and requires a great deal of introspection and vulnerability.

While sports was used to frame this article, the implications go well beyond sports to other industries, institutions, and spaces. Do we really believe that all brags should be humble? That we should appear shocked at our success in the public eye, despite the hard work we put into attaining it? That we should never toot our own horn? To respond yes to any of these questions conflicts with parallel rhetoric that encourages us to overcome imposter syndrome, own our successes, and be our own best cheerleader.

When we needlessly criticize successful people who are confident, a potential byproduct is that we discourage anyone from demonstrating confidence at all (for fear of chastisement) and we diminish public interest in pushing boundaries and innovating (both of which require an unshakeable belief in oneself). 

In 2018, when Snoop Dog was awarded a Hollywood star, he ended his acceptance speech by thanking himself and all the ways his efforts contributed to his success. It was a shock to hear in a society that sets unspoken norms that when you are awarded something, you’re supposed to thank everyone but yourself. Instead of criticizing him, many found his speech to be refreshing and honest. That gives me hope. I believe we can live in a society that loves and appreciates the underdogs, top dogs, and “snoop dogs” of the world without trying to tear any of them down.