Modelling self-confidence in users of a computer-based system showing unrepresentative design

✍ Scribed by P. BRIGGS; B. BURFORD; C. DRACUP

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 464 KB
• Volume: 49
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1071-5819
• DOI: 10.1006/ijhc.1998.0224

✦ Synopsis

While a great deal of research has demonstrated that users' self-efficacy beliefs have a major impact upon both their attitudes to technology and their performance, a related construct, self-confidence, has been largely ignored within the domain of human-computer interaction. This is surprising given the vast literature on the calibration of confidence which can be found within the judgment and decision literature. In this study, 60 participants were asked to complete a novel computer-based task, and to provide measures of self-confidence in terms of their anticipated performance at each stage of the task. Users' confidence judgements showed sensitivity to their rate of improvement on the task, but were poorly calibrated with actual performance at each stage. Furthermore, confidence judgements were insensitive to the complexity of the individual task components, even though these different components led to very different levels of performance. The style of computer interface was also found to affect anticipated performance independently of actual performance. The ability of existing models of confidence judgement to deal with these data is discussed.