Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Reducing Knowledge Overconfidence By Reducing The Threat Of Knowledge Cue Utilization, Christopher Neil Burrows

Master's Theses

Overconfident judgments are common. We are often more confident about things than we should be, and this may lead us to make maladaptive decisions. Debiasing confidence by cuing people in to how confident they should be could help people make better choices. However, people may be unwilling to accept debiasing information if doing so implies their own ignorance. This study examined whether self-affirmation can buffer people against threats to self-image, helping people to accept debiasing cues. I hypothesized that combining a cue with self-affirmation would lead to enhanced debiasing over cues or self-affirmation alone. In order to investigate this hypothesis, …