If on well-calibrated assessment you yourself are not “on your team”, others probably shouldn’t be either, in which case projecting confidence amounts to deceit.
Behaving in a socially confident manner is different in nature to lying.
Jehovah’s Witnesses (or insert your cult of choice) who secretly don’t believe in what they’re selling, army recruiters who have secretly come to know and reject the horrors of war, insurance salesmen who sell useless policies:
All these (and many others) can be deceitful even without telling you their respective lies explicitly, just by using their social capital / community standing / aura of authority to signal their allegiance to their tribe, lending it credence in a deceitful (dishonest because not in tune with their well-calibrated assessment) manner. The similarity to lying comes from social cues (such as exuding confidence in one’s role) and ‘explicit’ lies being forms of communication both.
It is possible to deceive others while using social confidence signals. Such signals are instrumentally useful for even vital for this and many other purposes. But this is not the same thing as the confidence being deceitful.
Jehovah’s Witnesses (or insert your cult of choice) who secretly don’t believe in what they’re selling, army recruiters who have secretly come to know and reject the horrors of war, insurance salesmen who sell useless policies:
All these (and many others) can be deceitful even without telling you their respective lies explicitly, just by using their social capital / community standing / aura of authority to signal their allegiance to their tribe, lending it credence in a deceitful (dishonest because not in tune with their well-calibrated assessment) manner. The similarity to lying comes from social cues (such as exuding confidence in one’s role) and ‘explicit’ lies being forms of communication both.
It is possible to deceive others while using social confidence signals. Such signals are instrumentally useful for even vital for this and many other purposes. But this is not the same thing as the confidence being deceitful.