A common lay theory states that a lack of confidence is a barrier to performance in many areas of life, such as athletic and scholastic performance. The assumption is that an underperforming individual could better live up to their potential if they only could enhance their confidence. This stands in stark contrast to conclusions from behavioral decision research, which finds that people are generally overconfident. By this account, increasing confidence without concurrently increasing knowledge should produce a host of negative outcomes, such as maladaptive risk taking and ignoring relevant information. This work attempts to reconcile these views, by showing that unjustified confidence in knowledge (i.e., confidence after controlling for knowledge) has both positive and negative effects, and that the resulting impact on decision outcomes is situation-specific. By doing so, this work will help inform interventions that target people's confidence levels.
To accomplish this goal, this 4-year research project introduces a theoretical framework for investigating the effects of unjustified confidence in knowledge and uses this framework to advance our understanding of how unjustified confidence influences decision outcomes. This project leverages a mixture of research designs, including survey-based and experimental studies. Phase 1, in year 1, will lay the groundwork by identifying the most promising interventions for increasing and decreasing confidence and scoping promising psychological and behavioral mechanisms by which confidence can influence decision outcomes. Phase 2, in years 2 and 3, will test individual pathways from unjustified confidence to decision outcomes. These studies will build up to Phase 3, in year 4, which will involve a large-scale test of how unjustified confidence affects psychological processes (such as expecting good decision outcomes), how these in turn influence behavioral processes (such as risk taking), how these effects are influenced by environmental factors (e.g., ease of use of new information), and how these ultimately influence decision outcomes. This project will end by constructing a comprehensive model of the consequences of confidence, which will guide future research and interventions to improve decision making.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
