Hard-Easy Effect
We are overconfident when solving hard tasks and underconfident when solving easy ones.
The hard-easy effect is a phenomenon where individuals display overconfidence for difficult tasks and underconfidence for easy tasks. On extremely difficult questions, people answer correctly less often than their stated confidence would predict; on easy questions, they are more accurate than they expect. This skews calibration in opposite directions depending on task difficulty.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Education Exam Confidence Students who feel 90% confident on a tricky trivia question are correct only 60% of the time, while students who feel 60% confident on an easy one are correct 85% of the time.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
Kevin finds assembling a basic model kit straightforward. He's now confident he can build a detailed, high-end scale model of a warship from scratch.
After a brief conversation, Fiona feels she understands the core issue of a complex legal dispute. She's unsure if she should buy the larger or smaller size of a t-shirt she's trying on.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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