The effects of advice and "try more" instructions on improving realism of confidence

Abstract

This study investigated whether participants can improve the accuracy of their confidence judgments by making second-order judgments, and whether advice (attend both to correct and incorrect items and consider the remember/know quality of the item), and "try more" instructions can help increase participants' accuracy. The participants (n=220) made confidence judgments of their answers to 50 recall questions on a video clip. Next, all the participants were asked to try to increase the accuracy of their confidence judgments by modifying those they believed showed poor realism. Although the participants did increase the accuracy of their confidence judgments, neither the advice nor the "try more" instructions improved their accuracy.

Keywords: 2340; Calibration; Confidence judgments; Debiasing; Episodic memory; Metacognition.