Confidence in Cognition and Intrapersonal Perception: Do We Know What We Think We Know About Our Own Cognitive Performance and Personality Traits?

Calibration research is concerned with the accuracy of confidence judgments made by individuals when responding to various cognitive tasks. Within the cognitive domain, research has demonstrated the existence of a trait of self-confidence that appears to be independent of the type of cognitive activity being investigated. However, the generality of this trait across other domains, such as personality assessment, remains largely unexplored. The present study addressed this by including a number of cognitive and personality assessment tasks within a single battery. It was expected that the usual general self-confidence factor would emerge in the structural analysis of the cognitive tasks and that this factor would also share variance with confidence measures obtained from the personality tasks. This study also investigated whether confidence and calibration differed as a function of ability level. A total of 127 participants completed the battery. Findings indicate that self-confidence did not differentiate from accuracy scores within the cognitive domain and that there was differentiation across the cognitive and personality domains. Also, low scorers were more mis-calibrated than high scorers on one of the reasoning tasks