Confidence calls are weighted more heavily in parapsychology studies

If a subject is confident about their answer, that’s generally weighed more heavily in parapsychology research. Reminds me of remote viewing studies and how [[ Uri Geller ]] would sometimes pass on tests if he didn’t feel confident about them.

from Learning to Use Extrasensory Perception by Charles Tart:

Initially each subject guessed at targets in three standard closed decks of Zener cards (five each of five symbols), and also indicated when he felt particularly confident about the correctness of a call. Such “confidence calls” have often been evaluated separately from total calls in parapsychological research and are frequently associated with a higher hitting rate. … In all three studies, there was a significant increase in the proportion of correct confidence calls, so subjects were learning something about the internal feelings that go with correct ESP performance. Further, in the first and third studies, the feedback group showed significant ESP hitting on their total scores as well as significant increases on their confidence calls following the feedback condition, even though their scoring had not differed significantly from chance before the training. Note also that, as would be expected from the learning theory application, subjects in the false feedback group showed a tendency, although it was not statistically significant, to make lower overall ESP scores and a lower proportion of correct confidence calls after the false feedback condition. psi