Perceptual Underconfidence

Abstract

Experimental interest in human decision making has been fertile in the past two decades. It is generally recognized that answers to questions involving general knowledge tend to produce overconfidence, whereas responses to perceptual tasks often result in underconfidence. While experimental psychologists debated the relative merits of single or dual explanations of these phenomena, differential psychologists suggested that confidence is a trait: Some people have high confidence and others express the opposite, no matter what type of task is undertaken. The current study examined these different perspectives using two complex cognitive and nine perceptual discrimination tasks from different sensory modalities. Findings suggest that underconfidence does not generalize across the perceptual domain, indicating that a more complex account of the miscalibration effect is needed. Such an account should incorporate both task characteristics and individual differences to produce a satisfactory psychological explanation of miscalibration. This point is highlighted by the presence of a strong confidence factor that has loadings from confidence ratings from diverse perceptual and cognitive tasks employed in this study.