Studies You Should Know: A Potential Pitfall of Passion: When Enthusiasm Distorts Self-Assessment
The Question
Follow your passion. It is one of the most repeated pieces of career advice in circulation, and organisations have increasingly built hiring and culture around it. The research has generally supported the intuition: passionate employees tend to perform better. But a 2024 study asks a less comfortable question. If passion reliably predicts higher performance, why does the size of that effect vary so considerably across studies? Bailey and colleagues propose an answer that complicates the rosy picture: passion may also inflate how well people think they are performing, independently of how well they actually are.
The Studies
The research draws on two methodologically distinct datasets, which strengthens the confidence that can be placed in the findings.
The first was a daily diary field study involving 829 employees across 33,160 observations. Participants recorded their passion, their self-assessed performance, and related variables on a daily basis over an extended period. This design captures within-person variation over time, rather than simply comparing passionate and less passionate people at a single point, and allows the researchers to track how fluctuations in passion relate to fluctuations in self-assessed performance day to day (Bailey et al., 2024).
The second was a controlled experiment with 396 participants, allowing the researchers to examine the passion-overconfidence relationship under more controlled conditions and probe the underlying mechanisms more directly.
What They Found
Across both studies, passion was associated with performance overconfidence: people who felt more passionate about their work also tended to hold more inflated views of how well they were performing, relative to more objective indicators of actual performance (Bailey et al., 2024). This is not simply a finding that passionate people are more confident in general. It is specifically about the gap between self-assessed and actual performance, and the finding that passion is associated with a larger gap.
This matters because overconfidence is not a neutral state. When people overestimate how well they are doing, they are less likely to seek feedback, less likely to identify areas needing improvement, and less likely to invest in the kind of deliberate effort that actually drives performance gains. Passion, in this account, may sometimes short-circuit the very mechanisms that would allow it to translate into sustained high performance (Bailey et al., 2024).
Making Sense of the Variability
The overconfidence finding provides a plausible explanation for something that has puzzled researchers: why the relationship between passion and performance varies so considerably in size across different studies and contexts. If passion sometimes boosts performance through increased motivation and engagement, but simultaneously introduces overconfidence that can undermine learning and improvement, then the net effect will depend heavily on which of these forces dominates in any given context (Bailey et al., 2024). Situations that provide clear, timely performance feedback may keep overconfidence in check; situations with ambiguous or delayed feedback may allow it to compound unchecked.
For Whom and When
The authors are careful to frame this not as a case against passion, but as a framework for understanding when passion is more or less likely to be beneficial. Passion’s association with overconfidence suggests it may be most valuable in contexts where objective performance feedback is readily available and where the work is well-suited to the motivated engagement passion produces. It may be more of a liability in contexts requiring accurate self-assessment, careful attention to gaps and errors, or receptivity to critical feedback (Bailey et al., 2024).
Why It Matters
The enthusiasm with which organisations seek out passionate employees has generally been treated as straightforwardly good practice. This research introduces a note of genuine complexity. Hiring for passion, fostering passion-driven cultures, and celebrating passionate commitment may also be inadvertently cultivating conditions in which employees are systematically overconfident about their own performance and therefore less receptive to the feedback and development that would make them better.
None of this means passion is bad. It means passion is more complicated than its reputation suggests, and that organisations and individuals would benefit from pairing it with structures that provide honest, timely, and clear performance information rather than assuming that passion and accurate self-knowledge naturally travel together.
Reference
Bailey, E. R., Krautter, K., Wu, W., Galinsky, A. D., & Jachimowicz, J. M. (2024). A potential pitfall of passion: Passion is associated with performance overconfidence. Social Psychological and Personality Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506241252461
