CHAPTER
7
Measures of the Trait of Confidence
Lazar Stankov1, Sabina Kleitman2and Simon A. Jackson2
1Australian Catholic University, Strathfield, NSW, Australia
2University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia
There are two main kinds of assessments in contemporary studies of individual differences in confidence:
(1) Personality-like, self-report questionnaires designed to assess one’s belief in his/her ability to accomplish
different tasks; and (2) Judgments of accuracy, or likelihood of success, after the completion of a task. Like
personality items, the first class includes general measures of self-perceptions that assess one’s views of habitual
tendencies or dispositions to do something in a given field (e.g., academic activity of some kind). The second
class of measures closely follows a particular cognitive or behavioral act. Importantly, their veracity can be exam-
ined by a comparison with this act. Therefore, self-report measures reflect one’s view of himself/herself without
the need to provide proof, whereas measures that follow a cognitive act are said to be ‘online’ (see Moore &
Healy, 2008 ;Koriat, 2000 ). These two classes of confidence measures have evolved independently and empirical
studies relating them directly are scarce.
Both kinds of confidence capture cognitive aspects (i.e., the probability of being correct, which is higher if the
person has high ability or the task is easy), personality (self-beliefs about the competencies related to perfor-
mance), and, implicitly, motivation (i.e., make accurate self-appraisals in a given situation and the intention to
initiate action). Thus, the difference is largely in terms of the relative emphasis on either personality-like or cogni-
tive aspects of confidence.
Prior to the development of self-report scales specifically designed to assess confidence, the construct was
inferred from traditional personality inventories. For example, confidence scale may be derived from the Big Five
personality inventory by assessing facets of Emotional Stability (i.e., the obverse of Neuroticism) and, say,
Extraversion. The first self-report scales specifically designed to measure confidence appeared in 1980s and will
be described in the first part of this chapter.
Online confidence measures were employed in studies of early psychophysicists (see Stankov, Lee, Luo, &
Hogan 2012 ).Johnson (1939) introduced a percentage scale to obtain confidence ratings. This is the approach fol-
lowed henceforth in virtually every empirical study of online performance-based measures of confidence.
Interestingly, Johnson’s (1939) factor analyses indicated the existence of a ‘confidence trait’ across different ability
measures: a finding supported by our own research, including many recent studies (see Stankov, 1999 ;Stankov,
Pallier, Danthiir, & Morony 2012 ;Stankov et al., 2012 ).
The main impetus for more contemporary work on confidence can be traced to a study reported by
Lichtenstein and Fischhoff (1977; Do those who know more also know more about how much they know? ), which initi-
ated psychological interest in individuals’ ability to monitor their judgments of accuracy. The study of confidence
was linked to the emerging field of decision-making and subsequently to research on metacognition. Within this
tradition, confidence is seen as an important dependent measure similar, in principle, to measures of accuracy
and speed. That is, confidence, accuracy and speed provide different kinds of information about the just-
completed cognitive act (see Stankov, 2000 ).
With regard to confidence versus self-efficacy judgments, as mentioned above, confidence overlaps with self-
beliefs and this overlap is particularly pronounced with self-efficacy judgments. For item-based measures of self-
efficacy, participants are simply asked to state how confident they are that they can solve a particular problem.
158Measures of Personality and Social Psychological Constructs.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-386915-9.00007-3 ©2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.