ISSN 0033-2941 DOI 10.2466/07.PR0.116k14w0 © Psychological Reports 2015 Psychological Reports: Mental & Physical Health CONFIDENCE: A CRITICAL REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE AND AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE FOR GENERAL AND SPECIFIC SELF-CONFIDENCE 1 EMRAH ONEY AND GIZEM OKSUZOGLU-GUVEN University of Mediterranean Karpasia, Nicosia, Cyprus, Turkey Summary.—This article provides a critical review of the literature pertaining to self-confidence and advances the argument of the need to separate the construct into its general and specific domains. The rationale is that distinguishing self-confi- dence into general and specific will increase conceptual parsimony and predictive power of each construct. Self-confidence is a defining characteristic capable of influencing in- dividuals' behaviour. As such, it has attracted the attention of research- ers from many cognate fields (i.e., psychology, marketing, medicine, and law). For example, self-confidence has been considered to be a predictor of buying behaviour and household consumption (Chakrabarty, Chopin, & Darrat, 1998), an influencer of information seeking behaviour (Locander & Hermann, 1979), a moderator of expectations (Yi & La, 2003), an anteced- ent of brand commitment (Sung & Choi, 2010), and a predictor of sports performance (Vealey, 1986). However, despite the frequent use of self-con- fidence to predict behaviours and behavioural outcomes, its conceptual- ization and definition vary considerably. The diversity in its conceptualiza- tion, as argued in this article, needs to be eliminated if future studies are to provide incremental knowledge and a unified theory of self-confidence. This article offers a critical review of the existing literature and distin- guishes confidence into its specific and general domains as a way of mini- mising conceptual diversity. More specifically, various definitions of confi- dence are presented first, followed by a discussion pertaining to the way in which self-confidence differs from similar constructs (i.e., trust, self-efficacy, and self-esteem). Next, the distinction of self-confidence into its general and specific domains is made, and it is argued that when self-confidence is seen as two constructs (i.e., general and specific), definition convergence is likely to be reached and the predictive power of each type of self-confidence will increase. Defining Confidence The origins of the word confidence can be traced to the Italian word fiducia, which in turn is related to the word fido, and to the Greek word 2015, 116, 1, 149-163. 1 Address correspondence to E. Oney, Ph.D., Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Business, University of Mediterranean Karpasia, Nicosia, North Cyprus, via Mersin 10, Turkey or e-mail (emrah.oney@akun.edu.tr).