Knowing with Certainty: The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence.

B. Fischhoff; P. Slovic; S. Lichtenstein

DOI:10.1037/0096-1523.3.4.552

Corpus ID: 54888532

Knowing with Certainty: The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence.

@article{Fischhoff1977KnowingWC,
  title={Knowing with Certainty: The Appropriateness of Extreme Confidence.},
  author={B. Fischhoff and P. Slovic and S. Lichtenstein},
  journal={Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance},
  year={1977},
  volume={3},
  pages={552-564}
}

B. Fischhoff, P. Slovic, S. Lichtenstein

Published 1977

Psychology

Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

How often are people wrong when they are certain that they know the answer to a question ? The studies reported here suggest that the answer is "too often." For a variety of general-knowledge questions (e.g., absinthe is [a] a liqueur or [b] a precious stone), subjects first chose the most likely answer and then indicated their degree of certainty that the answer they had selected was, in fact, correct. Across several different question and response formats, subjects were consistently… CONTINUE READING

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