People are often overconfident about their answers to general knowledge questions (e.g. whether chimpanzees have longer or shorter gestation periods than humans). And there is ample evidence that "real world" judgments, such as physicians' diagnoses of myocardial infarction, are often less than ideal in a similar way. The proposed research is intended to further develop and test a recently proposed model which asserts that features of how people bring to mind ("recruit") arguments pertinent to a given judgment situation lead to deficient judgment. This research is further anticipated to illuminate procedures that yield improved judgments. The "argument recruitment model" proposes that people rarely base their judgments on more than a few facts or arguments. And when they do bring to mind multiple arguments from memory, the ones retrieved later in the process tend only to support those presented earlier. The model predicts that judgment should be improved if the amounts and "balance" of retrieval of facts from memory are changed. Thus, the primary manipulation to be explored in this research is that of requesting study participants to recall all of the relevant facts (e.g., similar previous cases) they can prior to rendering their judgments. Support for the model will be indicated to the extent that such demands tend to reduce the overconfidence evident in participants' judgments.
