The hard–easy effect is a

cognitive bias A cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment. Individuals create their own "subjective reality" from their perception of the input. An individual's construction of reality, not the objective input, ...

that manifests itself as a tendency to overestimate the probability of one's success at a task perceived as hard, and to underestimate the likelihood of one's success at a task perceived as easy. The hard-easy effect takes place, for example, when individuals exhibit a degree of underconfidence in answering relatively easy questions and a degree of overconfidence in answering relatively difficult questions. "Hard tasks tend to produce overconfidence but worse-than-average perceptions," reported Katherine A. Burson, Richard P. Larrick, and Jack B. Soll in a 2005 study, "whereas easy tasks tend to produce underconfidence and better-than-average effects." The hard-easy effect falls under the umbrella of "

social comparison theory Social comparison theory, initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, centers on the belief that there is a drive within individuals to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their own o ...

", which was originally formulated by

Leon Festinger Leon Festinger (8 May 1919 – 11 February 1989) was an American social psychologist who originated the theory of cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. The rejection of the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychol ...

in 1954. Festinger argued that individuals are driven to evaluate their own opinions and abilities accurately, and social comparison theory explains how individuals carry out those evaluations by comparing themselves to others. In 1980, Ferrell and McGoey called it the "discriminability effect"; in 1992, Griffin and Tversky called it the "difficulty effect".

Experiments

In a range of studies, participants have been requested to answer general knowledge questions, each of which had two possible answers, and also to estimate their chances of answering each question correctly. If the participants had a sufficient degree of self-knowledge, their level of confidence in regard to each answer they gave would be high for the questions they answered correctly and lower for the ones they answered wrong. However, this generally is not the case. Many people are

overconfident Confidence is a state of being clear-headed either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective. Confidence comes from a Latin word 'fidere' which means "to trust"; therefore, having ...

; indeed, studies show that most people systematically overestimate their own abilities. Moreover, people are overconfident about their ability to answer questions that are deemed to be hard but underconfident on questions that are considered easy. In a study reported in 1997, William M. Goldstein and Robin M. Hogarth gave an experimental group a questionnaire containing general-knowledge questions such as "Who was born first,

Aristotle Aristotle (; grc-gre, Ἀριστοτέλης ''Aristotélēs'', ; 384–322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the Classical Greece, Classical period in Ancient Greece. Taught by Plato, he was the founder of the Peripatet ...

Buddha Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism. According to Buddhist tradition, he was born in ...

?" or "Was the

zipper A zipper, zip, fly, or zip fastener, formerly known as a clasp locker, is a commonly used device for binding together two edges of fabric or other flexible material. Used in clothing (e.g. jackets and jeans), luggage and other bags, camping ...

invented before or after 1920?". The subjects filled in the answers they believed to be correct and rated how sure they were of them. The results showed subjects tend to be under-confident of their answers to questions designated by the experimenters as to be easy, and overconfident of their answers to questions designated as hard.

Prevalence

A 2009 study concluded "that all types of judges exhibit the hard-easy effect in almost all realistic situations", and that the presence of the effect "cannot be used to distinguish between judges or to draw support for specific models of confidence elicitation". The hard-easy effect manifests itself regardless of personality differences. Many researchers agree that it is "a robust and pervasive phenomenon". A 1999 study suggested that the difference between the data in two studies, one performed in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tota ...

by Baranski and Petrusic (1994) and the other in Sweden by Olsson and Winman (1996), "may reflect cross-national differences in confidence in sensory discrimination".

Causes

Among the explanations advanced for the hard-easy effect are "systematic cognitive mechanisms, experimenter bias, random error, and statistical artifact". One 1991 study explained the hard-easy effect as a consequence of "informal experimenter-guided selection of almanac items, selection that changes the validity of the cues used by the subjects for selection of answers to the items". Psychological explanations for this phenomenon have also been offered up by Baranski and Petrusic (1994), Griffin and Tversky (1992), and Suantak et al. (1996).

Doubts

Some researchers, such as Brenner et al. (1996), Justil et al. (1997), and Keren (1991), have raised doubts about the existence of the effect. In a 1993 paper, Peter Juslin maintained that "(1) when the objects of judgement are selected randomly from a natural environment, people are well-calibrated; (2) when more and less difficult item samples are created by selecting items with more and less familiar contents, i.e. in a way that does not affect the validity of the cues, no hard-easy effect is observed, and people are well-calibrated both for hard and easy item samples." In 2000, Juslin, Anders Winman, and Henrik Olsson of

Uppsala University Uppsala University ( sv, Uppsala universitet) is a public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in operation. The university rose to significance durin ...

claimed that the hard-easy effect had previously "been interpreted with insufficient attention to important methodological problems". In their own study, when they controlled for two methodological problems, the hard-easy effect was "almost eliminated". They argued that "the hard-easy effect has been interpreted with insufficient attention to the scale-end effects, the linear dependency, and the regression effects in data, and that the continued adherence to the idea of a 'cognitive overconfidence bias' is mediated by selective attention to particular data sets". One specific point they made was that the hard-easy effect is almost completely eliminated "when there is control for scale-end effects and linear dependency".

References

External links