Scientific article
OA Policy
English

Large-scale experimental investigation of the reliability of confidence measures

Published inCommunications psychology, vol. 3, no. 1
First online date2025-11-18
Abstract

Whether individuals feel confident about their own actions, choices, or statements being correct, and how these confidence levels differ between individuals are two key primitives for countless behavioral theories and phenomena. In cognitive tasks, individual confidence is typically measured as the average of reports about choice accuracy, but how reliable is the resulting characterization of within- and between-individual confidence remains surprisingly undocumented. Here, we perform a large-scale resampling exercise in the Confidence Database (103 studies, 6000 participants) to investigate the reliability of individual confidence estimates, and of comparisons across individuals' confidence levels. Our results show that confidence estimates are more stable than their choice-accuracy counterpart, reaching a reliability plateau after roughly 50 trials, regardless of a number of task design characteristics. While constituting a reliability upper-bound for task-based confidence measures, and thereby leaving open the question of the reliability of the construct itself, these results characterize the robustness of past and future task designs.

Research groups
Funding
  • European Research Council [ERC-STG-INFORL 948671]
  • Agence Nationale de la Recherche (French National Research Agency) [ANR-17-EURE-0001]
Citation (ISO format)
BOULEAU, Clémentine, LEBRETON, Mael, JACQUEMET, Nicolas. Large-scale experimental investigation of the reliability of confidence measures. In: Communications psychology, 2025, vol. 3, n° 1. doi: 10.1038/s44271-025-00330-6
Main files (1)
Article (Published version)
Identifiers
Additional URL for this publicationhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00330-6
Journal ISSN2731-9121
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Technical informations

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