Reframing Confidence Instructions to Child Eyewitness Reduces Overconfidence but Does Not Improve Confidence–Accuracy Calibration

Abstract

Children are well-documented to exhibit poor confidence–accuracy calibration on lineup identification tasks. Children tend to report overconfidence in their (often inaccurate) lineup identification decisions. This research explored the extent to which school-aged children's (N = 142; 6- to 8-year-old) confidence reports are implicitly driven by perceived social pressure to provide a specific confidence rating. Children were randomly assigned to two different confidence instruction conditions: the neutral (n = 69) or the reframed conditions (n = 73). The reframed instructions encouraged honesty and instructed children to ignore perceived pressure when reporting confidence. Results revealed that the reframed instructions resulted in more conservative confidence judgments; however, this shift did not translate into those confidence ratings better reflecting children's identification accuracy. Overall, these findings provide evidence that, while external or social factors play a contributing role, other aspects of development are likely contributing more to the poor confidence–accuracy calibration observed with child eyewitnesses.