finance: Confidence in financial knowledge
In smdata: Data to Accompany Smithson & Merkle, 2013

Description Usage Format Details Source References Examples

Choice and confidence data from a study of financial knowledge involving U.S. undergraduates.

1	data("finance")

A data frame with 4230 observations on the following 11 variables.

sub: Participant number.
jmeth: Experimental condition, with levels 1cd 2ci 3ei (see details).
item: Item number.
easyfoil: Equals 1 if the foil (incorrect alternative) was easy, 0 if the foil was hard (see details).
targtop: Equals 1 if the correct alternative was the first one displayed (on top), 0 otherwise.
cho: Participant's choice (equals one for the first alternative, 0 for the second alternative).
corr: Participant's accuracy (essentially targtop==cho).
iproba: For conditions 2ci and 3ei, the participant's confidence in the first alternative.
iprobb: For conditions 2ci and 3ei, the participant's confidence in the second alternative.
probc: The participant's confidence in his/her choice (see details).
nchorev: The number of choice revisions that the participant made.

The data come from Study 2 of Sieck, Merkle, and Van Zandt (2007). Experimental participants completed a 30-item, 2-alternative test of financial knowledge. For each item, the participant first chose an alternative and then made a confidence judgment.

The confidence elicitation method varied across three between-subjects conditions. For condition 1cd, participants reported confidence in their chosen alternative on a scale from 50% to 100%. For conditions 2ci and 3ei, participants reported independent confidence judgments for each alternative on scales from 0% to 100%. These independent confidence judgments are contained in iproba and iprobb. In these conditions, probc is obtained by normalizing confidence in the chosen alternative by the sum of independent judgments.

In addition to reporting independent confidence judgments in condition 3ei, participants wrote an explanation in response to the question "Why is this option true?" prior to reporting each confidence judgment.

For each item, the incorrect alternative was manipulated to sometimes be easy (easyfoil==1) and sometimes be difficult (easyfoil==0). Foil difficulty was defined by the accuracy of an independent group of students on a four-alternative version of the financial knowledge test; see Sieck et al. for more detail.

Provided by Ed Merkle.

Sieck, W.R., Merkle, E.C., & Van Zandt, T. (2007). Option fixation: A cognitive contributor to overconfidence. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 103, 68-83.