Abstract
The certainty of judgment (or self-confidence) has been traditionally studied in relation with the accuracy. However, from an observer's viewpoint, certainty may be more closely related to the consistency of judgment than to its accuracy: consistent judgments are objectively certain in the sense that any external observer can rely on these judgments to happen. The regions of certain vs. uncertain judgment were determined in a categorical rating experiment. The participants rated the size of visual objects on a 5-point scale. There was no feedback so that there were no constraints of accuracy. Individual data was examined, and the ratings were characterized by their frequency distributions (or categories). The main result was that the individual categories always presented a core of certainty where judgment was totally consistent, and large peripheries where judgment was inconsistent. In addition, the geometry of cores and boundaries exhibited several phenomena compatible with the literature on visual categorical judgment. The ubiquitous presence of cores in absence of accuracy constraints provided insights about objective certainty that may complement the literature on subjective certainty (self-confidence) and the accuracy of judgment.
Highlights
Certainty in judgment of size When we describe the size of an object by means of words like ‘small’, ‘large’, ‘huge’, we may be more or less certain about the size and/or about the word to use
Fuzzy sets can be interpreted in different ways, the most common being possibility functions
We consider the category of each rating ‘R’ as a fuzzy set, i.e. a membership function mR defined on the space of sizes, and we identify membership functions with conditional probabilities, i.e., mR (s) is p(R|s), the conditional probability of rating ‘R’ given the stimulus size ‘s’
Summary
Certainty in judgment of size When we describe the size of an object by means of words like ‘small’, ‘large’, ‘huge’, we may be more or less certain about the size and/or about the word to use. Certainty is a key factor when different courses of action stem from judgment. For instance suppose we want to grasp a stone. If we judge that it is ‘tiny’, we will pick it with two fingers, we will use one hand if it looks ‘medium-sized’ and two hands if it looks ‘large’. If our judgment is certain, we may act immediately. We may inspect the stone more carefully, take more time to consider, and eventually use a trial-and-error strategy
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