More by Glossary of selected Judgement and Decision-making, Belief-related, and other Psychology terms »
|
Unwarranted Confidence People seem to be unduly confident of their judgement abilities. When we cannot be sure that a belief is accurate (or very probably true), it is reasonable that our confidence in the belief be in proportion to the evidence available. Appropriate confidence is often a more realistic goal than certainty. A major advantage of accurate beliefs is that this increases the likelihood that better decisions will be made. If our confidence depends appropriately on the evidence we have, and is updated as new evidence emerges, we will take the calculated risks we ought to take, and when action requires certainty, we will withhold action if we cannot be certain. It is desirable that people should have some feeling for how likely it is they may be wrong. A key to evading unwarranted confidence appears to be close attendance to accurate feedback†. (and practice!)
The nature of reconstructive and inferential processes involved in retrieving information from memory and the way in which such processes may introduce error is not that widely-known – a mistaken belief persists that what is produced from memory is a copy of the original stimulus or experience. That such beliefs remain abroad may play a part in people’s tendency to be wrong when they are confident they are right.
Consider the straightforward question: Potatoes are native of which country?
a. Ireland b. Peru
How confident is the reader of their selection? With questions of this kind many people select the incorrect answer and express a high degree of confidence in that answer (before being informed of the correct answer).
It is likely that many of those people who made the error that potatoes are native to Ireland had not previously been exposed to (direct) information on the origin of potatoes and so it could not be learnt or if the information was encountered it was only weakly-encoded. This suggests that they remembered information of, say, Ireland’s dreadful mid-nineteenth century potato famine in which many hundreds of thousands died and many hundreds of thousands of others emigrated to United States. So the respondents’ selection of Ireland probably rested on the availability in their memory of such an association of Ireland with potatoes. Had these overconfident rememberers not stopped their search with the most available association they may have recalled other relevant historical information such as the European exploration, colonization of, and trade and commodities from South America which might have alerted them to the faulty inference.
As part of our attempts to rein in our (unwarranted) level of confidence we should keep in mind that:
In general people’s overconfidence is greatest when accuracy is at chance levels and diminishes as accuracy increases, for example, between 50 and towards 100 per cent – discrepancies between accuracy and judgement are unrelated to decision-makers’ intelligence. (see also: Hindsight bias, Illusion of validity, Calibration of judgement, Predictive value, Redundancy, and Confidence, Post hoc reasoning, wishful thinking)
†Another factor strongly influencing decision-makers’ confidence is ‘accountability’. Those who see themselves as or are made accountable for their actions show less overconfidence than those who are not.
Back to: Glossary A-Z
Glossary of selected Judgement & Decision-making, Belief-related, and other Psychology terms A-Z »
Labels:
unwarranted confidence, overconfidence, over-confidence, confidence, confidence (unwarranted), confidence – unwarranted, confidence of belief, confidence in the accuracy of beliefs, confidence of belief in proportion to evidence, overconfidence bias |