Overview
Confidence does not equal accuracy in judgements of ability.
Types
| Name | Description | Sources |
|---|---|---|
| Overconfidence Effect | Excessive confidence in one's own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of questions, answers that people rate as "99% certain" turn out to be wrong 40% of the time. | [1] [2][3][8][9] |
| Hard–Easy Effect | The tendency to overestimate one's ability to accomplish hard tasks, and underestimate one's ability to accomplish easy tasks. | [1] [2][4][5][6] |
| Illusion of Validity | Believing that one's judgments are accurate, especially when available information is consistent or inter-correlated. | [1] [7] |
Performance Perspectives
- High intuitive confidence should itself be a cue to explore alternative perspectives and seek additional information. But is not itself an indicator of being incorrect as in the above mentioned study, the inverse is that 60% of the time those 99% certain were correct.
- One could seek to improve the accuracy of their confidence intuitions by measuring these over time and using the feedback to improve.
- While self-confidence can have a performance benefit, inaccurate estimations and expectations can be detrimental; one needs to take care to make good use of both sides of the effect.
- "Overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts, and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion." - Daniel Kahneman [10]
References & Acknowledgements
[1] Wikipedia contributors. "List of cognitive biases." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 14 Jul. 2020. Web. 23 Jul. 2020. link
[2] Fielder, Klaus (October 2014). "Regressive Judgment: Implications of a Universal Property of the Empirical World" (PDF). Sage Journals – via Google Scholar. Lay summary.
[3] Adams PA, Adams JK (December 1960). "Confidence in the recognition and reproduction of words difficult to spell". The American Journal of Psychology. 73 (4): 544–52. doi:10.2307/1419942. JSTOR 1419942. PMID 13681411.
[4] Lichtenstein S, Fischhoff B (1977). "Do those who know more also know more about how much they know?". Organizational Behavior and Human Performance. 20 (2): 159–183. doi:10.1016/0030-5073(77)90001-0.
[5] Merkle EC (February 2009). "The disutility of the hard-easy effect in choice confidence". Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 16 (1): 204–13. doi:10.3758/PBR.16.1.204. PMID 19145033.
[6] Juslin P, Winman A, Olsson H (April 2000). "Naive empiricism and dogmatism in confidence research: a critical examination of the hard-easy effect". Psychological Review. 107 (2): 384–96. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.107.2.384. PMID 10789203.
[7] Dierkes M, Antal AB, Child J, Ikujiro Nonaka (2003). Handbook of Organizational Learning and Knowledge. Oxford University Press. p. 22. ISBN 978-0-19-829582-2. Retrieved 9 September 2013.
[8] Hoffrage U (2004). "Overconfidence". In Rüdiger Pohl (ed.). Cognitive Illusions: a handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgement and memory. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-84169-351-4.
[9] Sutherland S (2007). Irrationality. Pinter & Martin. ISBN 978-1-905177-07-3.
[10] Kahneman, Daniel (19 October 2011). "Don't Blink! The Hazards of Confidence". New York Times. Adapted from: Kahneman, Daniel (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 978-1-4299-6935-2.
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