Research Supervisor Connect
Overconfidence is one of the most persistent findings in all of psychology. When humans are overconfident in their judgements and forecasts, they fail to prepare for errors, account for risk, and perform worse. Consequently, overconfidence is one of the most costly, pervasive, and intractable challenges facing society. This project aims to develop tools to help people better monitor their performance, make more calibrated decisions, and become more self-aware.
Training people to self-monitor more effectively by eliciting optimised self-assessments has significant potential to reduce overconfidence and improve decision-making. Reducing overconfidence means individuals will be able to better assess risk, forecast the future, and select achievable goals. However, to accomplish this we need to know how to design and implement self-assessment prompts that deliver better self-monitoring. Using a combination of laboratory studies and field work this will advance our understanding of the contextual features that determine when and for whom self-assessment produces genuine insight into one’s abilities. Importantly, this project will look at the interplay of self-assessment and overconfidence in a wide variety of cognitive and socio-emotional abilities to ensure generalisable basic and applied knowledge is generated. The overall goal of this project is to investigate how self-assessment affects performance monitoring and individuals’ overconfidence in their own abilities.
Dr Double’s research focuses on cognitive and educational psychology. In particular, he researches how people monitor and control their thoughts and emotions to optimise learning.
The opportunity ID for this research opportunity is 3550