Reframing Confidence Instructions to Child Eyewitness Reduces Overconfidence but Does Not Improve Confidence–Accuracy Calibration

Abstract

ABSTRACTChildren are well‐documented to exhibit poor confidence–accuracy calibration on lineup identification tasks. Children tend to report overconfidence in their (often inaccurate) lineup identification decisions. This research explored the extent to which school‐aged children's (N = 142; 6‐ to 8‐year‐old) confidence reports are implicitly driven by perceived social pressure to provide a specific confidence rating. Children were randomly assigned to two different confidence instruction conditions: the neutral (n = 69) or the reframed conditions (n = 73). The reframed instructions encouraged honesty and instructed children to ignore perceived pressure when reporting confidence. Results revealed that the reframed instructions resulted in more conservative confidence judgments; however, this shift did not translate into those confidence ratings better reflecting children's identification accuracy. Overall, these findings provide evidence that, while external or social factors play a contributing role, other aspects of development are likely contributing more to the poor confidence–accuracy calibration observed with child eyewitnesses.