Confidence in specific judgements can predict resistance to misinformation, but a general tendency toward overconfidence might predict susceptibility to believing false claims.
Akshina Banerjee and colleagues surveyed 503 Americans through the online platform Lucid. Each participant was asked to rate the accuracy of news headlines and their confidence in those specific judgements. In addition, participants completed a psychological test called the "Generalized Overconfidence Task," in which they were asked to distinguish objects in fuzzy images, and then rate their confidence in their guesses. In actuality, the images are impossible to parse; any correct guesses will be due to chance. So those who express high confidence in their own abilities to identify the images are presumably operating on the basis of a general character trait of overconfidence.
The authors found that people who had high confidence in specific judgements about headlines were generally better than average at discerning true from false headlines. On the other hand, people who had high levels of general overconfidence were worse at telling true headlines from false ones—although this relationship was not significant in a replication test with another group of online participants. According to the authors, confidence in specific judgements tracks good discernment, whereas general confidence in one's judgements does not—and this has implications for how society might try to intervene to better equip the public to resist misinformation.
