Learning not applied

Over-precision is a robust phenome of overconfidence. When people display over-precision they show excessive precision in their beliefs. This paper examines the effect of hard and easy questions, the effect of feedback and the effect of education on over-precisions to test if education affects the effect of feedback on over-precision. To test this, an online questionnaire was sent to 109 respondents. They were randomly assigned to either the control or treatment group. The both groups received 10 interval questions and the treatment group received corrective feedback. The results revealed that both groups displayed over-precision. There was no significant difference between the groups with education and feedback. Also, no general effect of feedback or education was found. There was, however, evidence that respondents answered easy questions more accurate than moderate questions, which were, in turn, answered more accurate than hard questions. So the hard-easy effect was found for over-precision. According to these results, it is suggested that with hard tasks, an indication should be given to suggest the difficulty of the task so that people can take this into account when they solve the task. It also suggests that at least on short term, there is no reason to give feedback because it does not improve performance.