Researchers Explore Why We Think We’re Right When We’re Wrong
The result is a new bias named the “illusion of information adequacy”
Have you ever talked with someone who insists they’re right, even when they aren’t? Or get a bit of road rage when you’re in a hurry, and the car in front of you seems to stop for no reason other than to make you late, so you honk only to discover the car was waiting for a pedestrian you hadn’t noticed? What is it that makes us so confidently wrong?
That’s precisely what a team of researchers wanted to find out. So, they conducted a study to better understand how people make judgments about people or situations based on their confidence in the information they have, even when what they know isn’t the whole picture. The result adds another bias we should all be mindful of — the illusion of information adequacy.
The Study
The new study, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on October 09, 2024, is a collaboration led by Hunter Gehlbach, an educational psychologist at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. Gehlbach, along with Carly Robinson, a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, and Angus Fletcher, a professor of English at Ohio State University, designed an experiment to measure people’s…
