Cultural Influences on Confidence
May,
2005
The Study
In this study, Mary Lundeberg, chairperson of the Department of
Teacher Education, and colleagues Paul Fox and Amy Brown of the
University of Minnesota and Salmar Elbedour of Ben-Gurion University
investigate gender and cross-cultural differences in confidence in
various subject areas in five countries.
Findings
Investigators of confidence judgment in educational settings
typically examine students’ confidence in two ways: by comparing
students’ confidence ratings with the corresponding frequency of
being correct (confidence calibration), or by comparing the ability
of students to discriminate between what they know and what they do
not know (confidence discrimination). The authors investigated
gender differences in confidence judgments of 551 postsecondary
students from 25 university courses in five countries: Isreael, the
Netherlands, Palestine, Taiwan, and the United States. All data were
derived from students’ assessments of he accuracy of their answers
on items on students’ actual course exams. What the researchers
found was that women were in fact just as confident (or more so)
than men, both overall and when they were correct in answering test
items.
They also found
large and significant differences in overall confidence associated
primarlily with country and culture. “Most simply” the authors
wrote, “culture influenced confidence to a much greater extent than
did gender....” For example, the Palestinian students showed the
highest confidence ratings when correct and when incorrect.
Conversely, the lowest overall confidence was in Taiwan; however,
the students in Taiwan showed the highest discrimination between
confidence when they were correct on an item and confidence when
incorrect. Given the findings, the authors conclude that confidence
appears to have “situational, cultural components.”
Citation
Lundeberg, M.A., Fox, P.W., Brown, A.C. & Elbedour, S. (2000).
Cultural influences on confidence: Country and gender. Journal of
Educational Psychology, 92(1), 152-159.
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