Your confidence in your beliefs matters. If you are sitting in a meeting, and you have
an idea for a solution to a problem, you are more likely to suggest that
solution when you are confident that it is a good solution. In addition, people are more likely to be
persuaded by your arguments when you are confident in your beliefs than when
you are merely tentative about them.
Some research on confidence focuses on how your confidence
in a belief or evaluation is based on the speed of the thinking you are doing. This research seems inconsistent on the
surface. On the one hand, people use the
speed of their judgments to determine whether something is familiar. Fast judgments signal that the object being
evaluated is familiar, and people should often be confident in their judgments
about familiar items. This work suggests
people should be confident in fast judgments.
On the other hand, people prize judgments that have been
thought through carefully. The effort
required for careful thinking leads to slow judgments. This work suggests that people should often
be confident in slow judgments.
But people clearly are not confident in every judgment, so
it can’t be that people are confident about all fast and slow judgments.
This puzzle was explored in a paper by Zakary Tormala,
Joshua Clarkson, and my University of Texas colleague Marlone Henderson in a
March, 2011 paper in the Personality and
Social Psychology Bulletin.
These authors suggested that fast and slow judgments are
most useful in different situations.
When people are forming an opinion about an item for the first time,
then it is better for them to be slow than to be fast, because that would
signal to them that they were thinking through the issue carefully. In contrast, when people are expressing an
opinion about an item that they have encountered before, then it is better for
them to be fast than to be slow. In this
case, the speed would suggest that a previous evaluation they made was easy for
them to recall.
Tormala, Clarkson, and Henderson provided evidence for this
possibility in three studies. In one representative
experiment, participants began the study by studying a series of 12 paintings on
a computer screen for 10 seconds each for a later memory test. Then, participants were shown one painting
and were asked to evaluate how much they liked it. Some people evaluated a painting that they
studied in the first part of the experiment.
The rest evaluated a painting they had not seen before.
After making their evaluation, people were told that the
software running the study was keeping track of measurements relating to the
way students make decisions. They were
then given feedback about the amount of time it took them to evaluate the
painting. Half the students received
(bogus) feedback that their judgment was made more quickly than that of most
other students participating in the study, while the other half of the students
received feedback that their judgment was slower. After getting this feedback, people rated
their confidence in their earlier evaluation of the painting.
The influence of people’s belief about the speed of their
judgment depended on whether the painting they evaluated was familiar. People who saw the familiar painting were
more confident when they were told they made a fast judgment than when they
were told they made a slow judgment.
People who saw the unfamiliar painting showed the opposite pattern—they
were more confident when they were told they made a slow judgment than when
they were told they made a fast judgment.
These results suggest that most of us have two different
beliefs about what ought to make us confident in judgments. When we are expressing a belief we have
already formed, we expect our gut reaction to give us an accurate
evaluation. When we are forming an
evaluation of a new object, though, we believe that we should think it through
carefully.
Finally, these results make clear that it is not so easy to
determine how quickly you have made a judgment.
In the studies reported in this paper, people took as much time as they
wanted to make their judgments. Their
beliefs about whether the judgment they made was done quickly or slowly
depended on feedback that they were given from the experimenters. More generally, you make judgments about how
efficiently you are thinking by comparing yourself to others, because you often
do not have an objective standard for measuring speed.
