Abstract
This study assessed the correspondence between judgment and confidence in those judgments on a task requiring subjects “to read between the lines” and recognize the implications of target persons’ word associations. College students attempted to detect which of three “suspects” had imagined committing a theft, on the basis of the “suspects’” responses to a word-association test. In addition to the standard preparatory information given to no-clues subjects, half of the subjects received a list of clues that were diagnostic or contradiagnostic of thief status. Successful judgment was not related to self-evaluated performance or to confidence. However, with aggregations across subjects, a significant correlation was found between group hit rate and mean confidence across the 10 items of the judgment task. This relationship held true for subjects given the standard information and for subjects provided with additional information about valid clues. Finally, calibration curves revealed that subjects tended to be overconfident of their judgments whenever they estimated their success probabilities above 70%. Clue information had a weak effect on hit rate but no effect on confidence.
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We wish to thank Gordon Pitz for his comments on the manuscript.
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Greening, L., Dollinger, S.J. Confidence at recognizing psychological implications. Bull. Psychon. Soc. 23, 311–313 (1985). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330168
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03330168