Now, new research confirms that overprecision is a common and robust form of overconfidence<\/strong> driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments.<\/p>\n The research, conducted by researchers Albert Mannes of The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and Don Moore of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, revealed that the more confident participants were about their estimates of an uncertain quantity, the less they adjusted their estimates in response to feedback about their accuracy and to the costs of being wrong<\/strong>.<\/p>\n \u201cThe findings suggest that people are too confident in what they know and underestimate what they don\u2019t know,\u201d says Mannes.<\/p>\n The new findings are published in Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n Research investigating overprecision typically involves asking people to come up with a 90% confidence interval around a numerical estimate \u2014 such as the length of the Nile River \u2014 but this doesn\u2019t always faithfully reflect the judgments we have to make in everyday life. We know, for example, that arriving 15 minutes late for a business meeting is not the same as arriving 15 minutes early, and that we ought to err on the side of arriving early<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Mannes and Moore designed three studies to account for the asymmetric nature of many everyday judgments. Participants estimated the local high temperature on randomly selected days and their accuracy was rewarded in the form of lottery tickets toward a prize<\/strong>. For some trials, they earned tickets if their estimates were correct or close to the actual temperature (above or below); in other trials, they earned tickets for correct guesses or overestimates; and in some trials they earned tickets for correct guesses or underestimates.<\/p>\n The results showed that participants adjusted their estimates in the direction of the anticipated payoff after receiving feedback about their accuracy<\/strong>, just as Mannes and Moore expected.<\/p>\n But they didn\u2019t adjust their estimates as much as they should have given their actual knowledge of local temperatures<\/strong>, suggesting that they were overly confident in their own powers of estimation.<\/p>\n Only when the researchers provided exaggerated feedback \u2014 in which errors were inflated by 2.5 times \u2014 were the researchers able to counteract participants\u2019 tendency towards overprecision.<\/p>\n The new findings, which show that overprecision is a common and robust phenomenon, urge caution:<\/p>\n \u201cPeople frequently cut things too close<\/strong> \u2014 arriving late, missing planes, bouncing checks, or falling off one of the many \u2018cliffs\u2019 that present themselves in daily life,\u201d observe Mannes and Moore.<\/p>\n \u201cThese studies tell us that you shouldn\u2019t be too certain about what\u2019s going to happen, especially when being wrong could be dangerous<\/strong>. You should plan to protect yourself in case you aren\u2019t as right as you think you are.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release via HealthCanal: Overprecision \u2014 excessive confidence in the accuracy of our beliefs \u2014 can have profound consequences, inflating investors\u2019 valuation of their… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13898"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14047,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13898\/revisions\/14047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"gambling](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/gambling-chips-dice.jpg\")
Overprecision \u2014 excessive confidence in the accuracy of our beliefs \u2014 can have profound consequences, inflating investors\u2019 valuation of their investment<\/strong>s, leading physicians to gravitate too quickly to a diagnosis, even making people intolerant of dissenting views.<\/p>\n