Hypercorrection of high confidence errors in children

Abstract

Three experiments investigated whether the hypercorrection effect – the finding that errors committed with high confidence are easier, rather than more difficult, to correct than are errors committed with low confidence – occurs in grade school children as it does in young adults. All three experiments showed that Grade 3–6 children hypercorrected high confidence errors and the children also claimed that they ‘knew those answers all along.’ Experiment 2 included two second-guess tasks following error commission, one in which the children attempted to choose the correct answer from six options and the other in which they tried to generate a correct second response. Neither provided evidence that children actually knew high confidence corrections all along. Experiment 3, however, showed that the children had some preferential partial knowledge insofar as they needed fewer hints to guess the correct answers to high confidence than to low confidence errors.