A Study on the Effects of Information Characteristics on the Overconfidence Phenomenon in Intuitive Probability Judgements

정보의 주요 특성이 직관적 확률판정에서의 과신현상에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구

Previous studies have shown strong tendancy toward overconfidence in intuitive probability judgements. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the relations between this overconfidence phenomenon and the three major characteristics of information, namely, the pertinance, the redundancy and the quantity. An experiment was conducted where the subjects were asked to respond to 120 questions of the same type. In each question, the subjects' task was to predict, in the light of given information, which of the two given countries would have had higher GNP in 1979 and to give the probability that their choice would be correct. The results suggests that only the pertinance of information has significant influence on the degree of overconfidence.