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Does Overconfidence Really Confer Adaptive Benefits to Children’s Learning?

Mengqi Hu¹; Wenbo Zhao²; Meiyuan Cao^3,4; David R. Shanks⁵; Xiao Hu^6,7; Liang Luo^1,8; Chunliang Yang^1,7

¹ Institute of Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University · ² School of Sociology, Beijing Normal University · ³ College of Education for the Future, Beijing Normal University at Zhuhai · ⁴ Environment Monitoring Department, Guangdong Polytechnic of Environmental Protection Engineering · ⁵ Division of Psychology and Language Sciences, University College London · ⁶ Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University · ⁷ Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education, Beijing Normal University · ⁸ State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University

Does overconfidence really confer adaptive benefits to children’s learning? Through a tripartite investigation involving a preregistered replication (Study 1; N = 30, children aged 6–8 years), computational simulation (Study 2), and an experimental intervention (Study 3; N = 64, children aged 6–8 years), we first replicated previous findings that highly overconfident (HO) children exhibited less negative performance change across a memory task than their low-overconfidence (LO) counterparts. However, this pattern was driven by participant-selection bias and regression-to-the-mean effects rather than by adaptive benefits of childhood overconfidence. When experimentally manipulating children’s overconfidence levels to eliminate these methodological drawbacks, the difference in performance changes between HO and LO children disappeared. These findings challenge an influential hypothesis about the adaptive nature of childhood overconfidence, underscore the risks of median-split designs with difference scores, highlight the necessity of causal experimental approaches in developmental research, and raise concerns about educational practices promoting positive illusions in children.

DOI

10.1177/09567976261455283

Volume

37 (7)

Pages

477-492

Language

en

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