30th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (October 19-22, 2008): SPURIOUS CONSENSUS AND OPINION REVISION: WHY MIGHT PEOPLE BE MORE CONFIDENT IN THEIR LESS ACCURATE JUDGMENTS?

Tuesday, October 21, 2008: 12:00 PM

Grand Ballroom AB (Hyatt Regency Penns Landing)

Ilan Yaniv¹, Shoham Choshen-Hillel² and Maxim Milyavsky², (1)Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel, (2)Hebrew University of Jerusalem

A decision-maker polls others. opinions and finds they highly agree with each other. Should this increase her confidence in her final decision? Our experiments shed light on a puzzling phenomenon whereby high intercorrelations among opinions increase confidence and decrease validity. Participants made more accurate judgments on the basis of independent opinions, but they reported greater confidence in judgments based on dependent (agreeing) opinions. Paradoxically, they were more confident in their less accurate estimates, although they were aware of the nature of sampling of the opinions on each trial. The implications for sampling of opinions in decision making are considered.

See more of: Concurrent Session Abstracts D: Joint Session with Society for Judgment and Decision Making

See more of: 30th Annual Meeting of the Society for Medical Decision Making (October 19-22, 2008)

D-3 SPURIOUS CONSENSUS AND OPINION REVISION: WHY MIGHT PEOPLE BE MORE CONFIDENT IN THEIR LESS ACCURATE JUDGMENTS?