Knowledge Calibration: What Consumers Know and What They Think They Know

Alba, Joseph W.; Hutchinson, J. Wesley

doi:10.1086/314317

Cited by 651 publications

(604 citation statements)

References 261 publications

(291 reference statements)

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“…Research on overconfidence has found that subjective and objective measures of performance are poorly correlated (see Alba & Hutchinson, 2000 for a comprehensive review).…”

Section: How Perceptions Of Difficulty Drive Miscalibration In Relatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

Burson

Larrick

Klayman

2006

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

305

289

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People are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others'. Kruger and Dunning (1999; argue that most inaccuracy is attributable to unskilled performers' lack of metacognitive skill to evaluate their performance. They overestimate their standing, whereas skilled performers accurately predict theirs. Consequently, the majority of people believe they are above average. However, not all tasks show this bias. In a series of ten tasks across three studies, we show that moderately difficult tasks produce little overall bias and little difference in accuracy between best and worst performers, and that more difficult tasks produce a negative bias, making the worst performers appear more accurate in their judgments. This pattern suggests that judges at all skill levels are subject to similar degrees of inaccuracy and bias. Although differences in metacognitive ability may play a role in the accuracy of interpersonal comparisons, our results indicate that, for the most part, the skilled and the unskilled are equally unaware of how their performances compare to those of others. Skilled or Unskilled 3Skilled or Unskilled, but Still Unaware of It: How Perceptions of Difficulty Drive Miscalibration in Relative ComparisonsResearch on overconfidence has found that subjective and objective measures of performance are poorly correlated (see Alba & Hutchinson, 2000 for a comprehensive review).While most of this research compares confidence in one's estimates with one's actual performance, one particular vein focuses on people's accuracy in estimating their ability compared to their peers. Such judgments are important in many contexts. In many societies, success in school, jobs, entrepreneurship, sports, and many other activities are largely a function of how one's ability and performance compare to others'. Thus, the ability to estimate one's relative standing can have a major impact on one's life choices and one's satisfaction with those choices.The most common finding in this area is a "better-than-average" effect: On average, people think that they are above average. However, this tendency is not uniform. The overestimation comes mostly from poor performers. Figure 1 summarizes results from studies by Kruger and Dunning (1999) showing this effect. Kruger and Dunning (1999; argue that this happens because people who perform poorly at a task also lack the metacognitive skill to realize that they have performed poorly. On the other hand, people who are more skilled have both the ability to perform well and the ability to accurately assess the superiority of their performance. Borrowing from the title of Kruger and Dunning's paper, we refer to this as the "unskilled-unaware hypothesis."The unskilled-unaware hypothesis has logical and intuitive appeal. As Kruger and Dunning (1999) point out, the skills it takes to write a grammatically correct sentence are the same skills it takes to recognize a grammatically correct sentence. The most incompetent Skilled or Unskilled 4 individuals overstate their abilities in ma...

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“…Research on overconfidence has found that subjective and objective measures of performance are poorly correlated (see Alba & Hutchinson, 2000 for a comprehensive review).…”

Section: How Perceptions Of Difficulty Drive Miscalibration In Relatimentioning

confidence: 99%

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

Burson

Larrick

Klayman

2006

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

305

289

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…The overconfidence effect is prominent among the cognitive illusions catalogued by the heuristics-and-biases program, and it has received considerable research attention (for reviews, see Alba & Hutchinson, 2000;Hoffrage, in press;Lichtenstein, Fischhoff, & Phillips, 1982). Overconfidence research is essentially concerned with achievement, measured in terms of the extent to which people are calibrated to the accuracy of their knowledge.…”

Section: Does "Overconfidence" Disappear In Representative Designs?mentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Representative Design in an Ecological Approach to Cognition.

Dhami¹,

Hertwig²,

Hoffrage³

2004

Psychological Bulletin

375

285

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Egon Brunswik argued that psychological processes are adapted to environmental properties. He proposed the method of representative design to capture these processes and advocated that psychology be a science of organism-environment relations. Representative design involves randomly sampling stimuli from the environment or creating stimuli in which environmental properties are preserved. This departs from systematic design. The authors review the development of representative design, examine its use in judgment and decision-making research, and demonstrate the effect of design on research findings. They suggest that some of the practical difficulties associated with representative design may be overcome with modern technologies. The importance of representative design in psychology and the implications of this method for ecological approaches to cognition are discussed.

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“…doi:10. /j.appet.2007 preferences in domains not related to food is often relatively low (Alba & Hutchinson, 2000). Hoch (1987) asked participants to predict the attitudes, interests, and purchase behaviors of their spouses, their peers (married MBA students), and the average American consumer.…”

Section: Prediction Accuracymentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting children's meal preferences: How much do parents know?

2008

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We investigate how accurate parents are at predicting their children's meal preferences and what cues best describe parents' predictions. In Study 1, 30 parents predicted their children's school lunch choices from actual school menus. Parents' prediction accuracy matched the stability of children's meal choices (assessed in a 4-month retest), implying that accuracy was as high as can be expected. Parents appeared to make their predictions by using specific knowledge about their child's likes and by projecting their own preferences. In Study 2, we asked 58 parents to predict their children's preferences for 30 randomly drawn school meals, and compared them to the children's actual preferences. Again, parents showed high prediction accuracy and predicted the lunches their children liked correctly more often than the disliked ones. Overall, parents' accuracy in predicting their children's food preferences was as good as or better than found in previous preference prediction studies that used less ecologically relevant task domains. r

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Knowledge Calibration: What Consumers Know and What They Think They Know

Cited by 651 publications

References 261 publications

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

The Role of Representative Design in an Ecological Approach to Cognition.

Predicting children's meal preferences: How much do parents know?

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