TY - JOUR

T1 - Accuracy, latency, and confidence in abstract reasoning: The influence of fear of failure and gender

AU - Preckel, Franzis

AU - Freund, Philipp Alexander

PY - 2005

Y1 - 2005

N2 - Aims For many cognitive tasks, participants take longer to make mistakes than to answer correctly. Known as the false>correct (i.e., F>C)-phenomenon, effects have been replicated for both adaptive and non-adaptive tests. Support for a choice-accuracy heuristic comes from the unrelated observation that latency appears more strongly related to confidence than to accuracy. Bridging various fields of research in the present study, it was predicted that latencies for answers with high confidence are shorter than latencies for low confidence responses. Method: Students (N=103) were tested with a non-adaptive computer-assisted figural matrices test. Participants gave confidence ratings on the correctness of each response. Results: The F>C-phenomenon was replicated, though there were no differential effects of ability level. In addition, confident responses had shorter latencies than responses given with low confidence. Of note, confidence explained a small amount of variance in response latencies when accuracy was controlled, although gender and fear of failure both explained variance in confidence ratings (independent of latency, score, or motivational variables). Conclusion The results support the conceptualization of confidence as a personality trait that is influenced by answer accuracy, gender, and fear of failure.

AB - Aims For many cognitive tasks, participants take longer to make mistakes than to answer correctly. Known as the false>correct (i.e., F>C)-phenomenon, effects have been replicated for both adaptive and non-adaptive tests. Support for a choice-accuracy heuristic comes from the unrelated observation that latency appears more strongly related to confidence than to accuracy. Bridging various fields of research in the present study, it was predicted that latencies for answers with high confidence are shorter than latencies for low confidence responses. Method: Students (N=103) were tested with a non-adaptive computer-assisted figural matrices test. Participants gave confidence ratings on the correctness of each response. Results: The F>C-phenomenon was replicated, though there were no differential effects of ability level. In addition, confident responses had shorter latencies than responses given with low confidence. Of note, confidence explained a small amount of variance in response latencies when accuracy was controlled, although gender and fear of failure both explained variance in confidence ratings (independent of latency, score, or motivational variables). Conclusion The results support the conceptualization of confidence as a personality trait that is influenced by answer accuracy, gender, and fear of failure.

KW - Psychology

M3 - Journal articles

VL - 47

SP - 230

EP - 245

JO - Psychology Science

JF - Psychology Science

SN - 1614-9947

ER -