Effects of difficulty on judgemental probability forecasting of control response efficacy

✍ Scribed by N. Harvey

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1990
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 919 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0277-6693
• DOI: 10.1002/for.3980090406

✦ Synopsis

A judgemental control task was framed as a problem of medical decision making.The control parameter of a recursive system (i.e. a patient) was initially set so that output (i.e. a diagnostic index) fell outside a designated criterion range (corresponding to health). Subjects were told to bring the system's output into the designated range by resetting this control parameter (by specifying the dose of a drug). After each of these control responses, they made a probabilistic forecast that it would have the desired effect. It was found that these forecasts were more overconfident when the control task was more difficult but that the reason for this varied. When difficulty was manipulated across subjects, there was little evidence that lower control performance was associated with any lowering of the probabilistic forecasts. When difficulty was manipulated within subjects, they did lower their forecasts for more difficult task variants but did so insufficiently. In fact, relations between probabilistic forecasts of control response efficacy and proportion of those responses that were actually effective was linear with a slope of 0.44.