Watch for
Your confidence not matching the actual difficulty of a task.
Outcome & SelfBias #124
Hard-Easy Effect
We are overconfident on hard tasks underconfident on easy ones.
The tendency to display overconfidence on very difficult tasks while showing underconfidence on easy tasks because calibration varies with difficulty.
Why it matters: Consistent finding in calibration research. Part of the broader overconfidence literature.
Try this
Calibrate confidence using base rates of similar tasks performance.
Real-world example
A student is overly confident about passing a difficult exam but underestimates their performance on an easy quiz.
Key researchers
Sarah Lichtenstein, Baruch Fischhoff
First described in 1977
Psychological mechanism
Anchoring on task difficulty. Estimations of performance are anchored to general self-assessment and insufficiently adjusted for specific task difficulty leading to regression toward the mean.
Seminal research
Sarah Lichtenstein and Baruch Fischhoff (1977), "Do those who know more also know more about how much they know?"
Debrief
Biases are not character flaws. They are recurring patterns in how minds compress uncertainty, save energy, and narrate reality. Once you recognise the pattern, you can slow the decision down, test the assumption, and make space for a better explanation.
Sources
Original ResearchLichtenstein and Fischhoff (1977) — Calibration
EducationalAPA Dictionary entry