The effects of advice and “try more” instructions on improving realism of confidence

• A new methodology for improving realism of confidence is used.
• This study shows that people have the ability to improve their confidence realism.
• This study supports the notion that people have a meta-metacognitive ability.
• Although no evidence was found supporting that advice enhanced the improvements.

This study investigated whether participants can improve the accuracy of their confidence judgments by making second-order judgments, and whether advice (attend both to correct and incorrect items and consider the remember/know quality of the item), and “try more” instructions can help increase participants' accuracy. The participants (n = 220) made confidence judgments of their answers to 50 recall questions on a video clip. Next, all the participants were asked to try to increase the accuracy of their confidence judgments by modifying those they believed showed poor realism. Although the participants did increase the accuracy of their confidence judgments, neither the advice nor the “try more” instructions improved their accuracy.