Of all the things you hear on an archery field, the idea that you have to believe in yourself to shoot well is one of the most common. An archer who arrives at a competition convinced that a good score is there, so the saying goes, will shoot it, and confidence is the first thing to build in the days before. Anyone who has been shooting for a few years also knows the reverse version: confidence is not built with words, it turns up when the points do and leaves when they go. The two ideas describe the same link from opposite ends, and the difference is not merely theoretical, because it decides where the work goes: into the head before the competition, or into the shot, waiting for the head to follow.
Self-confidence is one of the mental variables with the most data collected on archers, and the first study dates from 1986. Nearly all of them find that confidence and score go together. Almost none, however, can say which way the link runs, because confidence is measured once and set against a score from the same period, and confidence reported before a competition already carries every score shot beforehand.
How confidence is measured
In these studies confidence is always what archers report about themselves in a questionnaire. The most widely used instrument is a competitive anxiety scale that includes a few questions on confidence and is filled in shortly before a competition; others use general sport confidence scales, or mental skills questionnaires in which confidence is a four-item subscale. In one Greek study, for example, one of the four confidence items asked archers whether, before and during the competition, they felt very sure they would shoot well, answering from 1, never, to 6, always.
The instrument matters more than it might seem. In five young pistol shooters who had followed eight weeks of psychological skills training, the general sport confidence scale rose significantly, while a scale built specifically for archery and shooting rose as well but did not cross the threshold. In twenty Indonesian archers on the eve of their provincial games, both blocks of a confidence questionnaire fell into the merely adequate band, and their sum landed in the good band by two points. So the numbers that follow should be read for what they are: measures of how sure archers say they feel, collected with different instruments.
The link with the score
The first large study is American: 188 recurve archers, from beginners to an Olympic medallist, with sixty-two physical, visual and psychological measures set against their average score for the year. Very few of the psychological measures moved with the score, and confidence was one of them, with a correlation of 0.32 in the 115 archers with complete data; the four ability groups, from an average of 1,272 points down to one of 1,054, also differed in the confidence they reported. Anxiety and attentional styles, on the other hand, stayed put. A few years later in Greece, nine national squad archers came to an indoor competition with more confidence than nine good archers who had not been selected, 28.9 against 22.2, but the study reports no test between the two groups.
The firmest figure comes from the Chinese national squad, in 2022. In sixty-one archers, twelve of them at international level, sport confidence reported a week before a competition was linked to performance with a total effect of 0.57. Performance, however, was an index that added the qualification score and the set points from that competition's matches to a score for the technical grade already reached: the outcome, in other words, also contained the archer's career.
The other coefficients are higher and more fragile. In fifteen archers at an Indonesian training centre, confidence correlated at 0.70 with their average training score, with recurve at 70 m and compound at 50 m lumped together; in twenty Malaysian compound archers it correlated at 0.56 with the score at 50 m; in twelve Indonesian high-school archers, confidence collected as a four-level category explained about 88% of the differences in score on its own, a share that with twelve people and a single predictor says more about the model than about the archers. In the larger samples the coefficients come down: thirty-two Malaysian juniors training at home during the COVID-19 isolation gave 0.36, and eighty Indian juniors measured before the qualification round of a national championship gave 0.24, a link that disappeared when men and women were looked at separately. These last two studies come from journals with questionable editorial standards.
Where the link cracks
The link breaks in two places, and one of them lies inside a study that supports it. In the twenty Malaysian compound archers, the authors also compared the ten with the highest scores against the ten with the lowest: confidence was 16.4 against 13.6, a difference that did not reach significance. It is not an independent contrary study, since the archers are the same, but it shows how much the result depends on the way the same data are examined. The second break comes from thirty-nine Turkish beginners at the end of a fourteen-week course: across the whole group, reported confidence did not correlate with how far the arrows landed from the centre at 18 m. It is a null result in beginners, in a venue with questionable editorial standards, and it carries little weight, but it runs against the claim.
That is why in the registry the claim that archers with more self-confidence score higher is reported. In 2018, when the null result in beginners arrived, it was contested for a few years; it returned to reported in 2021 with a second supporting study, and the studies that came later added further associations in the same direction without changing the kind of evidence. How much the mental factors weigh together was estimated by the 1986 American study, and the figure needs care: the block combining confidence, dwelling on past mistakes and visual imagery explained 26% of the differences in score, but it went into the regression first and its measures had been chosen precisely because they correlated with the score. The claim that a good share of the differences in score between archers is explained by mental factors is reported as well.
Before or after the points
The question we started from asks what comes first, and this is where almost every study stops. A correlation measured at a single moment says that two things move together across different people; it does not say whether confidence raises the score, whether the score raises confidence, or whether a third factor, such as years of shooting, raises both. The authors of the American study themselves read the link as a loop, in which a better score raises confidence and confidence in turn helps the score.
Some studies measure confidence before the competition and the score after it, which looks like a step forward. It is only partly one, because an archer who reports their confidence a week before a competition already knows how well they shoot, and the answer carries the training and the competitions of the previous months. In the Chinese national squad's index, the technical grade reached over the years even went into the outcome. In the eighty Indian juniors, where confidence was measured before the qualification round and the outcome was the qualification round alone, the link was among the weakest found.
Other clues point the opposite way, from practice to confidence. In seventy Greek archers at national level, measured before their national championship, those with six or more years of competition reported more confidence than those with one or two, 4.7 against 3.9 on a scale from 1 to 6, and the gain was already visible between three and five years, at 4.6. This too is a snapshot taken at a single moment, which cannot separate archers who grew through competing from archers who stayed in competition because they could already handle it, and so the claim that with more years of competition, archers report more confidence, better concentration and fewer worries is reported, on this one study.
The same clue comes, in the form of personal accounts, from the South Korean Olympic team. Eight archers interviewed two years before Tokyo talk mostly about their relationship with the coach, and one of them makes a precise point about confidence: it does not come from being reassured, but from the habit of winning built up in the small things of every day. In sixty-five high-level Korean archers asked what happens after an arrow in the X, seventy-four of a hundred coded answers described a rise in positive emotions. These are accounts, with no measures set against a score, but they describe a confidence that feeds on the arrows already shot.
Raising confidence
Another way to get at the direction would be to raise confidence and watch what the score does. Five studies have measured archers' confidence before and after a mental programme, all of them small, and three see it rise. The clearest result comes from Hong Kong: twelve competitive archers follow twelve weeks of mindfulness and their confidence goes from 19.5 to 27 points, a very large effect, while cognitive and somatic anxiety fall. In the Chinese national squad, sixteen archers followed through five months of weekly sessions, confidence rises little during the intervention and significantly only in the months after, from 88.6 to 93.6, with one participant getting worse on every measure. In forty-five young Malaysian archers it climbs steeply where imagery and self-talk are combined, but the journal has questionable editorial standards. In the other two it does not move. The first study, on three archers from the Korean reserve national squad, saw no clear trend over eight weeks; in eleven Turkish national squad archers, eight weeks of mindfulness left confidence where it was, from 24.7 to 24.6.
The claim that mental skills training raises an archer's confidence is therefore reported, with one limit shared by all these studies: confidence was measured only in those who followed the programme and never in a group carrying on with ordinary training, so the effect of the programme cannot be separated from the attention received or from the competition calendar. What moves also changes from one programme to another: in the Turkish group the skills that rose were relaxation, activation, competition planning and refocusing, and the claim that a mindfulness programme improves some of an archer's mental skills, not all of them is reported too.
The Hong Kong study did have a control group, matched for sex, ranking and competition, but it used it for the score: the twelve on the programme went from 626.8 to 638.2 points, the twelve controls from 625.7 to 622.7, and it is mainly on this comparison, small and not randomised, that the claim that meditation improves an archer's score is reported. That programme, however, also lowered anxiety and worked on many things at once, and no study has raised confidence alone to see whether the points follow.
Finally there is an indirect route, studied in the same Chinese national squad. Archers who said they more often reappraise their emotions, that is, change the way they think about a situation in order to change what they feel, also had more confidence, and through confidence the link with performance was positive, 0.20; at equal confidence, on the other hand, they did slightly worse, -0.27, and overall the two paths cancelled out. That is why the claim in the registry is written in the direction of the result: reappraising one's emotions does not come with better performance, and it is reported on a single sample measured at a single moment.
The coach during the competition
Whether the coach's behaviour shifts confidence during a competition has been asked by a single study, the one on the eight South Korean Olympians. They say they read their coach while they shoot: for one of them a coach watching the scores in silence looks worried and costs them confidence, for another a coach's anxiety is more catching than calm, and a technical correction in the middle of a match makes things worse. In difficult moments they ask for emotional support and concrete information about their shooting together, not one without the other. The claim that in competition archers read their coach's behaviour, and what they see changes their confidence is reported, on a single interview study: there are no scores and no measures of confidence, and the coaches were not asked anything.
Where the research stops
What is known about archers' confidence comes almost entirely from questionnaires filled in once and set against a score. No study has followed the same archers across several competitions, measuring confidence before and the score after each time, which is the design that could show whether today's confidence predicts tomorrow's score better than yesterday's score predicts today's confidence. Nor has anyone raised confidence alone, against a comparison group, to see whether the score follows. So the studies answer the archer's question halfway: confidence and score grow together, and which one pulls the other has yet to be established.
What I take to the shooting line
These studies do not say that believing is enough, and they do not say that confidence is irrelevant either. They say that in archers confidence and score go together, with links from weak to moderate once the samples are reasonably large, and that archers with more years of competition describe themselves as more sure. From this I draw three points, bearing in mind that none of them comes from an experiment.
The first concerns where confidence sits in preparation. Since the confidence reported before a competition already contains the scores shot beforehand, I would not treat it as a switch to flick in the days before, separate from the shooting. The ground an archer can stand on is the one the Korean Olympian describes, namely what they have already done: a qualification round shot in training with the same format and timings as the competition gives an expectation that rests on numbers, whereas no study of archers has measured what reassuring words do to the score.
The second is a measurement you can take yourself, and for one archer it answers the question the studies leave open. Before every competition, always at the same point, write down a number from 1 to 6 for how sure you feel that you will shoot well, modelled on one of the items in the Greek questionnaire, and after the competition write down the score. By the end of the season you can see whether, in your own data, confidence comes before your best competitions or rises after a run of good results. It is not a study, but it is the design that no research on archers has used, applied to a single person.
The third concerns whoever stands behind the shooting line. For the Korean Olympians, the silence of a coach watching the scores read as worry, and a technical correction mid-match made things worse. That is eight people, but talking it through costs little: archer and coach can agree before the competition what the coach will say and do during the matches, and what not. As for mental programmes, in the small groups where they have been tried they often raise reported confidence; what they do to the score I cover in the article on mental skills training.