| Abstract: | An experiment is reported in which participants rendered judgments regarding the disease states of hypothetical patients. Participants either reported likelihoods that patients had the target disease (no choice), or classified patients into disease categories and then reported likelihoods that their classifications were correct (choice included). Also, participants' likelihood judgments were made in response to either a probability probe question, or a relative frequency probe. Two distinct exemplar‐memory models were compared on their ability to predict overconfidence under these procedures. Both propose that people learn and judge by storing and retrieving examples. The exemplar retrieval model (ERM) proposes that amount of retrieval drives choice inclusion and likelihood probe effects. The alternative model assumes that response error mediates choice inclusion effects. Choice inclusion and the relative frequency probe reduced overconfidence, but the combined effects were subadditive. Only the ERM predicted this pattern, and it further provided good quantitative fits to these results. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. |
