THE INFLUENCE OF IMPROBABLE OPTIONS ON THE CONFIDENCE OF CHOICE

We need to make a choice between alternatives on numerous occasions in our everyday life. However, we are not always confident that we have made the right decision. The subjective sense of certainty that accompanies our decisions made in uncertain situations is usually expressed in labels or in percentages: “dead sure”, “it may be right”, 90%, etc. Calibration research focuses on what these verbal labels and percentages express and how they are related to the final outcome. For example, whether out of a 100 situations where we make decisions with 90% confidence, the number of decisions that afterwards can be considered correct decisions/judgments is truly around 90. The current research examines how the options that are ruled out easily by decision makers influence the confidence of choice for the remaining options. The general decision making process appears to start with ruling out unrealistic options and then contemplating the choice between the remaining realistic ones. On the basis of the study, it can be stated that unrealistic options do not make the decision more difficult and do not add to the uncertainty of decision making, on the contrary, they make the decision maker more confident. These results contradict the normative decision theory, the support theory of probability calibration, the theory of ecological validity and probabilistic mental models and are in accordance with the theory of optimistic overconfidence.