Abstract
Previous studies indicated that conditional predictions-the assessed probability that a certain outcome will occur given a certain condition-tend to be markedly inflated. Five experiments tested the effects of manipulations that were expected to alleviate this inflation by inducing participants to engage in analytic processing. Rewarding participants for accurate predictions proved ineffective. A training procedure in which participants assessed the likelihood of each of several outcomes before assessing the probability of a target outcome was partly effective in reducing overestimation. Most effective was the requirement to work in dyads and to come to an agreement about the assessed likelihood. Working in dyads helped alleviate prediction inflation even after participants made their individual predictions alone, and its debiasing effect also transferred to the estimates that were made individually on a new set of stimuli. The results were discussed in terms of the factors that make prediction inflation resistant to change.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 61-76 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes |
| Volume | 106 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - May 2008 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The research reported was conducted in the Institute of Information Processing and Decision Making, University of Haifa, Haifa, Israel. We gratefully acknowledge support for this research by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within the framework of German-Israeli Project Cooperation (DIP). We thank Rinat Gil and Hila Urian for conducting the experiments and Limor Sheffer for her help in the analyses of the data.
Keywords
- Conditional predictions
- Confirmation bias
- Debiasing procedures
- Judgment
- Metacognition
- Overprediction
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Applied Psychology
- Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management