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Retrospective Time Estimation: Comparing the Judgment of Resolving Time (JoRT) with Actual Resolving Time (ART) to Assess over- and Underconfidence

Lisa Son （ Barnard College ）

Seok-sung Hong （ Barnard College ）

Jini Tae （ Gwangju institute of Science and Technology ）

Tae Hoon Kim （ Kyungnam University ）

Yoonhyoung Lee （ Yeungnam University ）

Abstract

The commonly touted description of hindsight bias, where we believe that “we knew it all along,” has us assume that after having learned something, we were, to some degree, a “natural.” One's time estimation of a prior task, -- what we call the Judgment of Resolving Time (JoRT) --however, has not been tested. That is, do people "forget" all of the past time that they had invested into learning? Or, do they believe that they “knew it only somewhat faster” than the time it actually took to complete prior tasks? In the current study, we compared individual's JoRTs with time actually taken to resolve problems, and used the difference as a proxy for confidence. Specifically, we hypothesized that participants’ JoRTs would be slightly shorter than the actual time it took to resolve problems, given the prevalence of the hindsight bias. Surprisingly, this overconfidence was not found. On the contrary, people’s JoRTs, in both the United States (Experiment 1) and South Korea (Experiment 2), turned out to be longer than their actual resolving times, suggesting, we propose, a type of underconfidence. These results offer a potential new strategy for countering the bias -- retrospective time estimation -- while also providing a new tool in which to examine both over- and underconfidence.

Keywords

hindsight bias; overconfidence; metacognitive judgment; Time estimation; Confidence

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