The idea that a loud, confident person is covering for secret self-loathing has a name in psychology, the mask model, and two reviews of the evidence found the version researchers can actually support is narrower: self-regard that depends on winning

The idea that the loudest person in the room is compensating for something is one of those claims that feels too obvious to check. It is also, unusually for folk wisdom, a real hypothesis that psychologists have spent about thirty years trying to test, and th…