More information makes you more confident, if not more accurate | Psychology Today

More information makes you more confident, if not more accurate Psychology Today

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Ulterior Motives
How goals, both seen and unseen, drive behavior
by Art Markman, PhD

Excerpts:

A 2008 paper by Claire Tsai, Joshua Klayman, and Reid Hastie in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes suggests one factor that makes people overconfident. They find that as people get more information about a judgment they are making, it increases their confidence, even if it does not increase the accuracy of their judgment.

As people got more information, their overall accuracy did not change much. After seeing all 30 cues, people were only correct in predicting the winners of the game 67% of the time. However, by the end of the study, they were 79% confident in their responses. That is, their confidence went way up as they got more information, even though their accuracy stayed the same.

It is important to realize that confidence and accuracy are not that highly related. We are often asked to make decisions on the basis of expert opinion. There is a temptation to rely on the confidence of the expert to decide how much of that expert's opinion we should trust. Perhaps we are better off looking at that expert's past performance to make up our own mind about how confident we should be in the accuracy of their judgments.

Read full article: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/ulterior-motives/200910/more-information-makes-you-more-confident-if-not-more-accurate

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http://dreamlearndobecome.blogspot.com This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.