Gj. Browne et al., The effects of subject-defined categories on judgmental accuracy in confidence assessment tasks, ORGAN BEHAV, 80(2), 1999, pp. 134-154
Citations number
33
Categorie Soggetti
Management
Journal title
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES
The accuracy of confidence judgments can be determined using measures of di
scrimination and calibration. The present paper utilizes a new assessment m
ethodology that decomposes the confidence assessment task, allowing us to i
nvestigate discrimination and calibration skills in greater depth than has
been done in previous studies. Researchers investigating the goodness of co
nfidence judgments have typically grouped forecasters' assessments into exp
erimenter-defined categories, generally in equal widths of .10. In the pres
ent research, subjects created their own categories and later assigned conf
idence judgments to the categories, separating the tasks of discriminating
categories (discrimination) and assigning numbers to categories (calibratio
n), Further, the typical assessment procedure assumes that subjects are abl
e to discriminate equally across the confidence scale. Since subjects in th
e present study defined their own assessment categories, they could locate
those categories at any point on the scale. A final issue of interest was w
hether subjects were able to determine accurately the number of categories
into which they could discriminate, Sixty subjects performed 1 of 2 tasks,
general knowledge or forecasting, in both relatively easy and relatively ha
rd conditions. Results showed a trade-off in performance: Calibration gener
ally became worse as the number of categories increased, while discriminati
on generally improved. Overall accuracy was not affected by the number of c
ategories used. Further, subjects partitioned categories more at the high e
nd of the scale. Finally measures showed that subjects were not accurate in
their beliefs about their own discrimination ability. (C) 1999 Academic Pr
ess.