Is Overconfidence a Trait? An Adversarial Collaboration

A fundamental underlying question about the nature of overconfidence has continued to be subject to scholarly dispute: Is overconfidence a genuine psychological trait? To advance a contested research topic, we engaged in an adversarial collaboration where both research teams agreed upon a set of critical tests and preregistered our analyses and predictions prior to data collection. Our study leverages a methodological innovation: To measure trait overconfidence absent task-related confounds, we developed a set of novel tasks where performance is ostensibly random. When we assess confidence this way, we find robust relationships across tasks as measured by both confirmatory factor analyses and raw correlations. This indicates that some people do believe that they are able to perform relatively well on tasks even when there is little reason for that confidence. Our results support the claim that overconfidence might be a trait.