Over-Confidence and Learning about Yourself

Moore and Healy (2008) defined over-confidence as a multifaceted concept with three main domains: over-estimation, over-placement and over-precision. This paper studies if priming people with information on potential diseases the may develop can affect individuals' level of over-estimation, over-placement and over-precision. Results show that individuals' levels of over-estimation and over-placement are significantly affected when subjects are primed for diseases. This implies that when participants belong to the treatment group they tend to over-estimate and over-place less; while if they belong to the control group they tend to over-estimate and over-place more. However, there was insufficient evidence to conclude that participants were affected by priming techniques when measuring over-precision.