Abstract
Can people improve the realism of their confidence judgments about the correctness of their episodic memory reports by deselecting the least realistic judgments? An assumption of Koriat and Goldsmith’s (Psychol Rev 103:490–517, 1996) model is that confidence judgments regulate the reporting of memory reports. We tested whether this assumption generalizes to the regulation of the realism (accuracy) of confidence judgments. In two experiments, 270 adults in separate conditions answered 50 recognition and recall questions about the contents of a just-seen video. After each answer, they made confidence judgments about the answer’s correctness. In Experiment 1, the participants in the recognition conditions significantly increased their absolute bias when they excluded 15 questions. In Experiment 2, the participants in the recall condition significantly improved their calibration. The results indicate that recall, more than recognition, offers valid cues for participants to increase the realism of their report. However, the effects were small with only weak support for the conclusion that people have some ability to regulate the realism in their confidence judgments.
References
Allwood CM, Granhag PA, Johansson M (2003) Increased realism in eyewitness confidence judgements: the effect of dyadic collaboration. J Appl Psychol 17:545–561
Bakeman R (2005) Recommended effect size statistics for repeated measures designs. Behav Res Methods 37:379–384
Cutler BL, Penrod SD, Stuve TE (1988) Juror decision making in eyewitness identification cases. Law Human Behav 12:41–55
Dunlosky J, Serra MJ, Matvey G, Rawson KA (2005) Second-order judgments about judgments of learning. J Gen Psychol 132:335–346
Fischhoff B (1982) Debiasing. In: Kahneman D, Slovic P, Tversky A (eds) Judgment under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, pp 422–444
Flavell JH, Miller SA, Miller PH (1993) Cognitive development, 3rd edn. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ
Griffin D, Brenner L (2004) Perspectives on probability judgment calibration. In: Koehler DJ, Harvey N (eds) Blackwell handbook of judgment and decision making. Blackwell Oxford, UK, pp 177–198
Kelley CM, Lindsay DS (1993) Remembering mistaken for knowing: ease of retrieval as a basis for confidence in answers to general knowledge questions. J Mem Lang 32:1–24
Koriat A, Goldsmith M (1996) Monitoring and control processes in the strategic regulation of memory accuracy. Psychol Rev 103:490–517
Koriat A, Goldsmith M, Schneider W, Nakash-Dura M (2001) The credibility of children’s testimony: can children control the accuracy of their memory reports? J Exp Child Psychol 79:405–437
Leippe MR, Eisenstadt D (2007) Eyewitness confidence and the confidence-accuracy relationship in memory for people. In: Lindsay RCL, Ross DF, Read JD, Toglia MP (eds) Handbook of eyewitness psychology, vol 2. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, Mahwah, NJ, pp 377–425
Lichtenstein S, Fischhoff B (1980) Training for calibration. Organ Behav Hum Perform 26:149–171
Lichtenstein S, Fischhoff B, Phillips LD (1982) Calibration of probabilities. In: Kahneman D, Slovic P, Tversky A (eds) Judgement under uncertainty: heuristics and biases. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 306–334
Miller TM, Geraci L (2011) Unskilled but aware: reinterpreting overconfidence in low-performing students. J Exp Psychol Learn 37:502–506
Nelson TO, Dunlosky J (1991) When people’s judgments of learning (JOLs) are extremely accurate at predicting subsequent recall: the “delayed-JOL effect.”. Psychol Sci 2:267–270
Oberauer K, Schulze R, Wilhelm O, Süß H-M (2005) Working memory and intelligence—their correlation and their relation: comment on Ackerman, Beier, and Boyle (2005). Psychol Bull 131:61–65
Olejnik S, Algina J (2003) Generalized eta and omega squared statistics: measures of effect size for some common research designs. Psychol Methods 8:434–447
Raaijmakers JGW, Shiffrin RM (1992) Models for recall and recognition. Annu Rev Psychol 43:205–234
Robinson MD, Johnson JT (1996) Recall memory, recognition memory, and the eyewitness confidence-accuracy correlation. J Appl Psychol 81:587–594
Robinson MD, Johnson JT, Herndon F (1997) Reaction time and assessments of cognitive effort as predictors of eyewitness memory accuracy and confidence. J Appl Psychol 82:416–425
Sieck WR, Merkle EC, Van Zandt T (2007) Option fixation: a cognitive contributor to overconfidence. Organ Behav Hum Dec 103:68–83
Stankov L, Lee J, Paek I (2009) Realism of confidence judgments. Eur J Psychol Assess 25:123–130
van Overschelde JP, Nelson TO (2006) Delayed judgments of learning cause both a decrease in absolute accuracy (calibration) and an increase in relative accuracy (resolution). Mem Cognit 34(7):1527–1538
Yates JF (1994) Subjective probability accuracy analysis. In: Wright GA, Ayton P (eds) Subjective probability. Wiley, New York, NY, pp 381–410
Acknowledgments
This project was funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR) with a grant to the second author.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Buratti, S., Allwood, C.M. The accuracy of meta-metacognitive judgments: regulating the realism of confidence. Cogn Process 13, 243–253 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0440-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10339-012-0440-5