Article Dans Une Revue Communications Psychology Année : 2025

Large-scale experimental investigation of the reliability of confidence measures

Résumé

Whether individuals feel confident about their own actions, choices, or statements being correct, and how these confidence levels differ between individuals are two key primitives for countless behavioral theories and phenomena. In cognitive tasks, individual confidence is typically measured as the average of reports about choice accuracy, but how reliable is the resulting characterization of within- and between-individual confidence remains surprisingly undocumented. Here, we perform a large-scale resampling exercise in the Confidence Database (103 studies, 6000 participants) to investigate the reliability of individual confidence estimates, and of comparisons across individuals’ confidence levels. Our results show that confidence estimates are more stable than their choice-accuracy counterpart, reaching a reliability plateau after roughly 50 trials, regardless of a number of task design characteristics. While constituting a reliability upper-bound for task-based confidence measures, and thereby leaving open the question of the reliability of the construct itself, these results characterize the robustness of past and future task designs.

Fichier principal
Vignette du fichier
s44271-025-00330-6.pdf (3.25 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Reliability.RR.5.2.pdf (2.5 Mo) Télécharger le fichier
Origine Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte
Licence
Origine Fichiers éditeurs autorisés sur une archive ouverte
Licence

Dates et versions

halshs-05371342 , version 1 (19-11-2025)

Licence

Identifiants

Citer

Clémentine Bouleau, Maël Lebreton, Nicolas Jacquemet. Large-scale experimental investigation of the reliability of confidence measures. Communications Psychology, 2025, 3, pp.159. ⟨10.1038/s44271-025-00330-6⟩. ⟨halshs-05371342⟩
125 Consultations
186 Téléchargements

Altmetric

Partager

  • More