Feelings of Confidence and the Realism of Confidence Judgments in Everyday Life

Abstract

In the last decade, confidence judgments has been a popular research area in psychology (e.g., McClelland & Bolgar 1994). Still, our understanding of such judgments has only improved to a very limited extent. In this chapter we suggest that one way to improve this situation is to more closely attempt to identify the phenomenon under study. By attending more to the complexity of confidence judgments as they actually occur in everyday life, a more realistic understanding of at least some of the issues dealt with in previous research can be achieved. We hope that our characterization of confidence judgments in everyday life will convince the reader that one-or few-factor explanations, such as illustrated by the theories reviewed by McClelland and Bolgar (1994) for general knowledge questions, are unrealistically oversimplified when applied to confidence judgments in everyday life.

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