Caution! Warnings as a Useless Countermeasure to Reduce Overconfidence? An Experimental Evaluation in Light of Enhanced and Dynamic Warning Designs

People often display excessive overconfidence when providing interval estimates, which biases decision‐making. Research has investigated the various measures to effectively reduce overconfidence, and the use of warnings has subsequently been considered to have a negligible reduction effect. We demonstrate with two separate experiments that the impact of warnings has to be reviewed in light of dynamic warning designs and cognitive warning process models. In experiment 1, in contrast to previous studies that only used unstructured warnings, we implement a warning incorporating some core elements of a structured warning design based on research in the fields of human factors and ergonomics. Furthermore, accounting for recent developments in the warning literature, we distinguish between static and dynamic warning design. In experiment 2, we examine the effectiveness of different elements of dynamic warnings. We show that a significantly higher reduction of overconfidence can be achieved by combining a structured warning content with a dynamic stimulus change to increase the warning's noticeability. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Cognitive burden of survey questions and response times: A psycholinguistic experiment

An important objective in survey question design is to write clear questions that respondents find easy to understand and to answer. This contribution identifies the factors that influence question clarity. Theoretical and empirical evidence from psycholinguistics suggests that specific text features (e.g., low‐frequency words (LFRWs), left‐embedded syntax) cause comprehension difficulties and impose a high cognitive burden on respondents. To examine the effect of seven different text features on question clarity, an online experiment was conducted in which well‐formulated questions were compared to suboptimal counterparts. The cognitive burden of the questions was assessed with response times. Data quality was compared in terms of drop‐out rates and survey satisficing behaviour. The results show that at least six of the text features are relevant for the clarity of a question. We provide a detailed explanation of these text features and advise survey designers to avoid them when crafting questions. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.