Actor-observer differences in realism in confidence and frequency judgments.
Taking a social psychological approach to metacognitive judgments, this study analyzed the difference in realism (validity) in confidence and frequency judgments (i.e., estimates of overall accuracy) between one's own and another person's answers to general knowledge questions. Experiment 1 showed that when judging their own answers, compared with another's answers, the participants exhibited higher overconfidence, better ability to discriminate correct from incorrect answers, lower accuracy, and lower confidence. However, the overconfidence effect could be attributable to the lowest level of confidence. Furthermore, when heeding additional information about another's answers the participants showed higher confidence and better discrimination ability. The overconfidence effect of Experiment 1 was not found in Experiment 2. However, the results of Experiment 2 were consistent with Experiment 1 in terms of discrimination ability, confidence, and accuracy. Finally, in both experiments the participants gave lower frequency judgments of their own overall accuracy compared with their frequency judgments of another person's overall accuracy.
Allwood
Carl Martin
CM
Department of Psychology, Lund University, Box 213, SE-221 00 Lund, Sweden. cma@psychology.lu.se
Johansson
Marcus
M
D000328:Adult; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003071:Cognition; D016001:Confidence Intervals; D004192:Discrimination, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D010507:Periodicity; D011593:Psychology, Social / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*