Uninformed and Unaware: How Low-Validity Cues Trigger Faulty Judgments Through Overconfidence

• In Event: Poster Session 2
  In Poster Session: Using, Integrating, and Evaluating Information

Abstract

Professional organizations’ performance is heavily dependent on their employees’ ability to make informed judgments. From radiologists who need to detect cancer, to auditors searching for cues of fraud, professionals rely on their experience to make judgments in the workplace. However, most professionals are faced with low-validity cues to guide their judgment process, requiring broad knowledge of the environment’s structure to enable accurate judgment. If professionals have not learnt to distinguish between valid and invalid cues in their professional environment, they may be cognitively overconfident. This experimental study demonstrates that professionals can learn to make informed judgments and decrease cognitive overconfidence through learning from critical incidents.

Authors

• Therese Grohnert, Maastricht University

• Roger Meuwissen, Maastricht University

• Wim H. Gijselaers, Maastricht University