What We Do

Millions - probably billions - of people around the world suffer from feelings of insecurity and low self-esteem. Our goal is to conduct experimental research to develop interventions that might help people feel more secure. Our starting point is past research in which we have found that insecurity feelings derive in large part from anxieties about whether one will be liked, accepted, and respected by one's peers and significant others. Sometimes people are aware of these concerns, but often social insecurities of this type influence people's thoughts and feelings "automatically", without a lot of deliberate thought and sometimes even entirely outside of their awareness: All they experience is negative reactions to the self or to social situations.

People with fewer insecurities, on the other hand, seem to have a range of automatic thought processes that make them confident and buffer them from worrying about the possibility of social rejection. Fortunately, our recent research shows that with enough practice, even people with low self-esteem can develop these beneficial thought processes that might allow them to gradually become more secure and self-confident. We describe some of this latest research here, and provide some simple demonstrations of the kinds of repetitive training tasks we have developed. Our hope is to continue this work to try to identify the automatic patterns of thought that help people feel secure, and the training tasks that can help people engage in those patterns of thought.