More information search does not necessarily mean better-calibrated confidence

The supplied study summary reports that unjustified confidence—confidence unsupported by actual knowledge—was associated with greater information search and risk taking in sports betting, but had little consistent relationship with information use. It also reports greater feelings of empowerment and decisiveness, without an association with openness to information. These are reported associations, not demonstrated causal effects.

**Analytical judgment — inference:** The useful distinction is between seeking information and using it. The findings caution against treating visible research activity as evidence that confidence is justified. In this study, greater search was associated with unjustified confidence; the reported relationship with information use was much less consistent. This does not establish that additional searching was useless or that participants ignored contrary evidence. It does suggest that search activity alone is an inadequate test of calibration.

The study involved 997 participants who completed either a knowledge-confidence or forecasting-confidence assessment, followed by psychological and behavioral measures. The authors describe the patterns across the two tasks as largely consistent, with minor variations. That supports considering the distinction between search and use in both knowledge judgments and forecasts within this study’s domain. It does not establish that the same relationships hold in intelligence work, policy decisions or other settings.

**Practical implication — advisory inference:** An analytical review should assess the evidence behind a confidence judgment separately from the amount of research performed. A useful review question is: “Which information changed the assessment, and why?” Reviewers can also ask what would justify lowering confidence. These are proposed safeguards, not interventions tested by the supplied study. Their purpose is to make the contribution of information to judgment explicit rather than rewarding decisiveness or search volume as substitutes for evidential support.

The finding on openness matters as a limit on interpretation. The summary does not support describing unjustifiably confident participants as generally closed-minded. Nor does the association with decisiveness establish better decisions. The narrower reading is that unjustified confidence was associated with some psychological and behavioral measures but not consistently with others.

**Uncertainty:** The supplied summary gives no effect sizes, detailed measurement definitions or evidence about decision quality. It therefore cannot establish how large or practically consequential the reported relationships were. It also does not establish whether unjustified confidence drove search and risk taking, whether those behaviors affected confidence, or whether other factors explain the associations. The authors explicitly identify a need for experimental investigation and behavior-specific models of causal effects.

The defensible conclusion is limited but useful: in this sports-betting study, unjustified confidence was not simply associated with less information seeking. For analytical practice, the proposed lesson is to examine how evidence informs confidence—not merely whether a person feels decisive or keeps searching.

Source: https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jdm.2026.10040?rft_dat=source%3Ddrss