CONFIDENCE IN OWN AND OTHERS KNOWLEDGE

A person's confidence judgement of a statement reflects his/her degree of belief in the correctness of that statement. Deficient ability to assess the correctness of statements (or beliefs) can have serious con sequences in many situations. This study compares the realism (calibra tion) of subjects' confidence ratings in two situations (n = 64). The first situation was when the subjects confidence rated their own answe rs to general knowledge questions. The second was when the subjects ga ve confidence ratings of another person's answers to general knowledge questions. The results show that subjects were more poorly calibrated and were more overconfident in the second situation, i.e. when they g ave confidence ratings of answers given by another person, compared wi th when they rated their own answers. The data further indicates that the results can not be explained in terms of the amount of cognitive p rocesses invested when making the confidence judgements. For example, the subjects rated the other person's answers to questions they had an swered themselves, and to questions they had not seen before. No diffe rences in confidence or in calibration and other measures of judgmenta l realism were found between these two categories of questions. Nor di d instructions to imagine the thought process of the other person impr ove any of these measures. The subjects disagreed with the other perso n's answer on 23% of all occasions. Significantly poorer calibration w as shown where subjects disagreed with the other person than where the y agreed. Contents of a social nature attended to by the subjects may have affected the results. The results, when related to previous resea rch in the area, give rise to the question of how the social situation can be arranged to achieve the best calibration.