Measuring responsiveness to feedback as a personal trait

2011

Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian updating. We implement a direct experimental test. We study a large sample of 656 undergraduate students, tracking the evolution of their beliefs about their own relative performance on an IQ test as they receive noisy feedback from a known data-generating process. Our design lets us repeatedly measure the complete relevant belief distribution incentive-compatibly. We find that subjects (1) place approximately full weight on their priors, but (2) are asymmetric, over-weighting positive feedback relative to negative, and (3) conservative, updating too little in response to both positive and negative signals. These biases are substantially less pronounced in a placebo experiment where ego is not at stake. We also find that (4) a substantial portion of subjects are averse to receiving information about their ability, and that (5) less confident subjects are more likely to be averse. We unify these phenomena by showing that they all arise naturally in a simple model of optimally biased Bayesian information processing.

2007

Using a large sample of 656 men and women, we examine how subjects' confidence about their relative performance in an IQ test is affected by noisy feedback. Our experimental design allows us to cleanly separate subjects' heterogeneous prior beliefs from the updating process because we only track subjects' beliefs of being among the top half of performers. We find strong evidence for conservatism and asymmetry: subjects tend to update too little compared to the Bayesian benchmark and they tend to react more strongly to positive compared to negative feedback. Subjects who exhibit stronger asymmetry are also more confident prior to the IQ test. Men are significantly less conservative than women: therefore high-performing men become more confident than high-performing women after receiving the same feedback even when they start from the same initial confidence level. Men and women do not differ significantly in their asymmetry in our sample. To analyze the relationship between belief updating and behavior we replicate the design of Niederle and Vesterlund (2006) for a subgroup of 102 subjects. We find that conservatism is negatively correlated with entry into competition while asymmetry is positively correlated with entry into competition.

Experimental Economics, 2017

We test experimentally an explanation of over and under confidence as motivated by (perhaps unconscious) strategic concerns, and find compelling evidence supporting this hypothesis in the behavior of participants who send and respond to others' statements of confidence about how well they have scored on an IQ test. In two-player tournaments where the highest score wins, one is likely to enter at equilibrium when he knows that his stated confidence is higher than the other player's, but very unlikely when the reverse is true. Consistent with this behavior, stated confidence by males is inflated when deterrence is strategically optimal and is instead deflated by males and females when hustling (encouraging entry) is strategically optimal. This behavior is consistent with the equilibrium of the corresponding signaling game. Based on the theory of salient perturbations, we propose a strategic foundation of overconfidence. Since overconfident statements are used in familiar situations in which it is strategically effective, it may also occur in the absence of strategic benefits, provided the environment is similar.

2010

Overconfidence is a Social Signaling Bias * Evidence from psychology and economics indicates that many individuals overestimate their ability, both absolutely and relatively. We test three different theories about observed relative overconfidence. The first theory notes that simple statistical comparisons (for example, whether the fraction of individuals rating own skill above the median value is larger than half) are compatible (Benoît and Dubra, 2007) with a Bayesian model of updating from a common prior and truthful statements. We show that such model imposes testable restrictions on relative ability judgments, and we test the restrictions. Data on 1,016 individuals' relative ability judgments about two cognitive tests rejects the Bayesian model. The second theory suggests that self-image concerns asymmetrically affect the choice to get new information about one's abilities, and this asymmetry produces overconfidence (Kőszegi, 2006; Weinberg, 2006). We test an important specific prediction of these models: individuals with a higher belief will be less likely to search for further information about their skill, because this information might make this belief worse. Our data also reject this prediction. The third theory is that overconfidence is induced by the desire to send positive signals to others about one's own skill; this suggests either a bias in judgment, strategic lying, or both. We provide evidence that personality traits strongly affect relative ability judgments in a pattern that is consistent with this third theory. Our results together suggest that overconfidence in statements is most likely to be induced by social concerns than by either of the other two factors.

2004

Calibration research is concerned with the accuracy of confidence judgments made by individuals when responding to various cognitive tasks. Within the cognitive domain, research has demonstrated the existence of a trait of self-confidence that appears to be independent of the type of cognitive activity being investigated. However, the generality of this trait across other domains, such as personality assessment, remains largely unexplored. The present study addressed this by including a number of cognitive and personality assessment tasks within a single battery. It was expected that the usual general self-confidence factor would emerge in the structural analysis of the cognitive tasks and that this factor would also share variance with confidence measures obtained from the personality tasks. This study also investigated whether confidence and calibration differed as a function of ability level. A total of 127 participants completed the battery. Findings indicate that self-confidence did not differentiate from accuracy scores within the cognitive domain and that there was differentiation across the cognitive and personality domains. Also, low scorers were more miscalibrated than high scorers on one of the reasoning tasks.

When judging their likelihood of success in competitive tasks, people tend to be overoptimistic for easy tasks and overpessimistic for hard tasks (the shared circumstance effect; SCE). Previous research has shown that feedback and experience from repeated-play competitions has a limited impact on SCEs. However, in this paper, we suggest that competitive situations, in which the shared difficulty or easiness of the task is more transparent, will be more amenable to debiasing via repeated play. Pairs of participants competed in, made predictions about, and received feedback on, multiple rounds of a throwing task involving both easy-and hard-to-aim objects. Participants initially showed robust SCEs, but they also showed a significant reduction in bias after only one round of feedback. These and other results support a more positive view (than suggested from past research) on the potential for SCEs to be debiased through outcome feedback.

2021

Self-promotion—signaling to oneself or others that one has more social value or bargaining power than one actually does—can maximize one's claim to social benefits such as status and influence. However, since people often dislike self-promoters and prefer those who self-efface, engaging in self-promotion can be costly. The current research applies error management logic to develop hypotheses about the coordination of self-assessment biases in socially valued traits with personality strategies. For individuals pursuing a strategy organized around acquiring status and resources, it is less costly to err on the side of self-promotion. For individuals motivated by the avoidance of social threats, self-effacement is the less costly error. To test these ideas, we used three data sets (<em>N </em>= 721) containing measures of subjects' (1) biases in self-assessment of physical strength and attractiveness (using objective measures and self-assessments), and (2) variation...

Psihologia Resurselor Umane

Despite personality measurement and feedback being pervasive practices, there are self-judgment biases that may impair their usage. We set out to analyze the differences between two kinds of false feedback and real feedback on personality regarding perceived accuracy and preference. We propose that there would be no differences between false and real feedback regarding perceived accuracy, but we expect differences regarding feedback preference. A sample of 146 students completed the IPIP-50 instrument that measured the Big 5 Factors and received three kinds of feedback - a general one (Barnum effect as false feedback), a positive one (Better-than-average effect as false feedback), and a real one. They rated each regarding accuracy and preference. Results indicate differences regarding both dependent variables. Participants perceive false feedback as more accurate than the real one. Moreover, they prefer positive feedback over the other two, and general feedback compared to the real ...

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 2007

A common social comparison bias-the better-than-average-effect-is frequently described as psychologically equivalent to the individual judgment bias known as overconfidence. However, research has found "hard-easy" effects for each bias that yield a seemingly paradoxical reversal:

The Review of Economic Studies, 2013

Evidence from both psychology and economics indicates that individuals give statements that appear to overestimate their ability compared to that of others. We test three theories that predict such relative overconfidence. The first theory argues that overconfidence can be generated by Bayesian updating from a common prior and truthful statements if individuals do not know their true type. The second theory suggests that self-image concerns asymmetrically affect the choice to receive new information about one's abilities, and this asymmetry can produce overconfidence. The third theory is that overconfidence is induced by the desire to send positive signals to others about one's own skill; this suggests either a bias in judgment, strategic lying, or both. We formulate this theory precisely. Using a large data set of relative ability judgments about two cognitive tests, we reject the restrictions imposed by the Bayesian model and also reject a key prediction of the self-image models that individuals with optimistic beliefs will be less likely to search for further information about their skill because this information might shatter their self-image. We provide evidence that personality traits strongly affect relative ability judgments in a pattern that is consistent with the third theory of social signaling. Our results together suggest that overconfidence in statements is more likely to be induced by social concerns than by either of the other two factors.