Categorical Confidence
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Date
1983-04
Authors
Fischhoff, Baruch
MacGregor, Donald G.
Lichtenstein, Sarah
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Decision Research
Abstract
People 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.
Description
29 pages
Keywords
Categorical confidence, Overconfidence, Psychology, Confidence assessment
Citation
Fischhoff, B., MacGregor, D., & Lichtenstein, S. (1983). Categorical confidence (Report No. 81- 10). Eugene, OR: Decision Research.