In the courtroom, too, juries find confident witnesses more persuasive, according to research by Gary Wells, a psychologist who studies confidence among eyewitnesses — this despite the fact that witnesses' confidence, like that of the pundits, is largely uncorrelated with accuracy.
"People form their view months in advance," warns Stephen Stanley, senior market economist at RBS Greenwich Capital, who studied consumer confidence and presidential campaigns while at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Va.
Additionally, it is studied whether confidence or novelty measures are more effective to distinguish reliable from less reliable predictions.
In addition, in order to aid in future studies, confidence questionnaires and face and content validity questionnaires were collected.
Two studies obtained confidence intervals that included the null value of the OR and the other three studies' confidence intervals all exceed the null value, suggesting a possible effect.
In our study, confidence was a chief factor for establishing the saturation point, but it certainly was not the only component.
Limitations of the evidence include methodologic weaknesses in the studies, confidence intervals that bordered on no effect for mortality and use of paralytic agents, and inconsistent results for mortality.
In three out of these five studies confidence intervals did not include the null.
In our study, confidence intervals were calculated using a variance-covariance matrix on the fitted parameters.
We first note that for such studies, confidence interval-related reporting shortfalls persist.
