The persuasive power of knowledge: Testing the confidence heuristic.

ABSTRACT: According to the confidence heuristic, people are confident when they know they are right, and their confidence makes them persuasive. Previous experiments have investigated the confidence-persuasiveness aspect of the heuristic but not the integrated knowledge-confidence-persuasiveness hypothesis. We report 3 experiments to test the heuristic using incentivized interactive decisions with financial outcomes in which pairs of participants with common interests attempted to identify target stimuli after conferring, only 1 pair member having strong information about the target. Experiment 1, through the use of a facial identification task, confirmed the confidence heuristic. Experiment 2, through the use of geometric shapes as stimuli, elicited a much larger confidence heuristic effect. Experi

SUBMITTER: Pulford BD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6166527 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature