Fischhoff, BaruchMacGregor, Donald G.Lichtenstein, Sarah2016-11-082016-11-081983-04Fischhoff, B., MacGregor, D., & Lichtenstein, S. (1983). Categorical confidence (Report No. 81- 10). Eugene, OR: Decision Research.https://hdl.handle.net/1794/2062529 pagesPeople tend to be inadequately sensitive to the extent of their own knowledge. This insensitivity typically emerges as overconfidence. That is, people's assessments of the probability of having answered questions correctly are typically too high compared to the portion of questions they get right. Few debiasing procedures have proven effective against this problem. Those that have worked seem to be directive in character. Rather than improving subjects' feeling for how much they know, such procedures may have suggested to subjects how their probability assessments should be changed. These successful manipulations include giving feedback and requiring subjects to provide reasons contradicting their chosen answers. The present study attempted to improve the appropriateness of confidence with a nondirective method. Subjects were asked to sort items into a specified number of piles according to their confidence in the correctness of their answers. Subsequently, they assigned a number to each pile expressing the probability that each item in the pile was correct. It emphasizes confidence assessment over fact assessment; it forces the comparison of knowledge levels for different questions, it deemphasizes the need to produce numbers; it gives different hints as to the fineness of the discrimination that assessors can make. This procedure differed from its predecessors in many respects; nonetheless, performance here was indistinguishable from that observed elsewhere. Although some small pockets of improvement were noted, confidence was largely resistant to this manipulation. Such robustness is discouraging for the developer of elicitation procedures, encouraging for the student of judgmental processes.en-USCreative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0-USCategorical confidenceOverconfidencePsychologyConfidence assessmentArticle