Wide of the Mark: Evidence on the Underlying Causes of Overprecision in Judgment

Simplified mental representations as a cause of overprecision

“…On the other hand, subjects express "due doubt" in their interval estimations, that is, they do not deviate much from what a Bayesian analysis recommends. This might be related to the floor and ceiling effects observed in the first phase and signals that over/underprecision is a multifaceted phenomenon, as some other authors (Moore et al 2015) have already proposed.…”

“…This paper contributes in several ways to the existing debate on overprecision. First, we provide new laboratory evidence of overly narrow confidence intervals, carefully controlling for the knowledge subjects have, a point stressed by Moore et al (2015) and relatively unattended by prior research approaches. Since we control for the subjects' priors and the signals they observe, we can verify that overprecision in our experiment is at odds with the Bayesian standard.…”

Overprecision is a property of thinking systems

“…The Gini index can help assess whether reported distributions are more concentrated than they ought to be, independent of where they are centered (Gini, 1912;Lorenz, 1905;Soll, Palley, Klayman, & Moore, 2018). It allows for a comparison between the concentration of each individual's distribution relative to the true distribution (Moore, Carter, & Yang, 2015). A Gini of 1 indicates a perfectly concentrated distribution, with 100% of the mass in a single bin; a Gini of 0 indicates a perfectly dispersed distribution, with equal mass in each bin.…”