The Self-Consistency Theory of Subjective Confidence

Abstract

Innumerable studies have yielded a positive correlation between subjective confidence and accuracy, suggesting that people are skillful in discriminating between correct and wrong answers. The chapter reviews evidence from different domains indicating that people’s subjective confidence in an answer is diagnostic of the consensuality of the answer rather than of its accuracy. A self-consistency model (SCM) was proposed to explain why the confidence-accuracy correlation is positive when the correct answer is the consensually chosen answer but is negative when the wrong answer is the consensual answer. Several results that were obtained across a variety of tasks provided support for the generality of the theoretical framework underlying SCM.