title: The disutility of the hard-easy effect in choice confidence.
abstract: A common finding in confidence research is the hard-easy effect, in which judges exhibit greater overconfidence for more difficult sets of questions. Many explanations have been advanced for the hard-easy effect, including systematic cognitive mechanisms, experimenter bias, random error, and statistical artifact. In this article, I mathematically derive necessary and sufficient conditions for observing a hard-easy effect, and I relate these conditions to previous explanations for the effect. I conclude that all types of judges exhibit the hard-easy effect in almost all realistic situations. Thus, the effect's presence cannot be used to distinguish between judges or to draw support for specific models of confidence elicitation.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Wichita State University, Wichita, Kansas 67260, USA. edgar.merkle@wichita.edu
authors.forename: Edgar C
authors.initials: EC
authors.lastname: Merkle
mesh_terms: D001288:Attention; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003469:Culture; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011337:Probability Learning; D012106:Research; D035501:Uncertainty