People are likely to overestimate their accuracy of their judgments

In our daily life, we should make many judgments and we believe that these judgments are correct, even some are errors. These phenomenons called overprecison by scientists can have profound effects, increasing investors’ participation in investments, leading physicians to conclude quickly a diagnosis, even making people presenting dissenting views. Now, new research makes it acceptable that overprcision is a common and strong form of overconfidence driven, at least in part, by excessive certainty in the accuracy of our judgments

The new findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Research investigating overprecision typically involves asking people to put up with a 90% or above interval around a numerical estimate , such as the length of the Nile River -- but this doesn't always faithfully reflect the judgments we have to make in everyday life. We know, for example, that arriving 15 minutes late for a business meeting is not the same as arriving 15 minutes early, and that we ought to err on the side of arriving early.

Researchers design experiment that account for the asymmetric nature of many everyday judgments.

The results showed that participants adjusted their estimates in the direction of the anticipated payoff after receiving feedback about their accuracy, just as Mannes and Moore expected.

But they didn't adjust their estimates as much as they should have given their actual knowledge of local temperatures, suggesting that they were overly confident in their own powers of estimation.