Models of human behaviour and confidence in judgement: A review

This paper reviews the literature on the accuracy of confidence in human judgement. Although extensive reviews have been previously published, few attempts have been made to relate the conclusions of these studies to models of human behaviour. This paper seeks to interpret the previous experimental findings in terms of models of behaviour. The person-situation dimensions of the task problem (the familiarity of the task requirements, the familiarity of the topic of interest, the extent of adquate feedback) and the context in which the task is performed were found to provide some insight into the variation in calibration of expressions of confidence in the accuracy of human judgement.