What can the instructor do to overcome the Authenticity Bias in students? A recent Blog post by Eugene Wallingford raises the issue that students often perform according to their perception of their abilities rather than their actual abilities. If a student performs better than their &quot;natural abilities&quot; suggest then all is well, of course. However some students do less well than  they might simply because they think they aren't &quot;smart enough&quot; to do better.
It is a well-known phenomenon, at least in the US, that some students do poorly in math because they have the belief that &quot;I can't do math.&quot; Often enough, however it is just lack of exposure or poor teaching that got them to that belief. It might even be a single bad experience. The same is likely true in other technical subjects. For that matter, it may be true in most subjects, but it may also be that the problem is more likely to be overlooked in, say, History.
The author of this believes that success comes from interest and hard work not natural ability, but that may not satisfy many students. In fact, saying &quot;you just need to work harder&quot; may increase their frustration, rather than their confidence.
Of course a self-perceived lack of ability can easily lead to a lack of interest.
The question, then, is:
What can the instructor do to overcome feelings in the students that being a CS Superstar simply isn't in their future, and so help them not settle for less than they might achieve?
Some ideas might be interesting ways to speak to them, but hopefully many of you have seen this and have creative ways (exercises, teams, ..., anything) that can get a student to live beyond their self-perceived limitations.

Authenticity Bias is a common phenomenon in recently promoted professionals who have new responsibilities. It is the sense of being a fraud in their new position. &quot;This isn't me, I'm playing a role.&quot; Often the role demands behavior different from what they are comfortable with. Many, however, have found that not accepting the new role is a path to failure. Falling back on old habits, &quot;the real me&quot; simply fails in the new role.
On the other hand, playing the new role consciously for a while can lead to a &quot;new me&quot;, overcoming the Authenticity Bias.
Share their own struggles. Period. The instructor can start dispelling the myth by sharing his/her own story (replete with self-doubt, struggle, and frustration most likely) about studying computer science.

In Harvard's CS50 course, the professor shares his experience of not starting as a CS major and of essentially taking CS50 himself pass/fail. That's in the first lecture and communicates an important message about his journey not being one of simply innate talent. In another MOOC I've referenced before (Programming Languages from UW), the professor points out that he didn't write a line of code before college. As a student in each course through edX and Coursera, respectively, these small windows into the journeys of the professors has boosted my own confidence that one does not to be fluent in assembly at age 10 (exaggeration) to be a skilled programmer/computer scientist.

I share with students my own long and winding road that led me to CS. I share with them what I continue to study in my free time. I display old, poorly-written code. I recall one instance from teaching last year when I was trying to communicate to students how important it is to read program specifications and language documentation extremely carefully. From a homework assignment for Programming Languages, Part A, I kept figuratively banging my head against the desk because I was sure my logic and code were right, but I wasn't passing the checker. The problem: I was misunderstanding how a library function was working. Once I re-read the documentation and realized my error, the fix was trivial. Moments like this happen to everyone at every level of ability. Everyone struggles with something at some point.

Students need to see that the person teaching them is fallible, and that his/her knowledge has been gained through a lot of "blood, sweat, and tears," not because he/she wrote C code at age 5 (exaggeration again!) and never had a problem learning anything thereafter.

I also find some of the stories from freeCodeCamp inspiring. Their forum and Medium blog are filled with examples of individuals making career changes, working hard for an extended period of time, and achieving some level of "success." 

The bottom line: find stories to share that show students there are more people feeling what they feel than they might first imagine. Prove to them that computer science rewards hard work, discipline, and focus. In my mind, that starts with the person in the front of the room sharing his/her journey.