Processes on the borderline between cognitive abilities and personality: Confidence and its realism

Recent literature on various aspects of "self"points to the importance of processes that tap both personality and cognitive abilities to some extent but are hard to classify as either. Empirical studies to be reviewed in this chapter ask participants to provide confidence ratings after answering items on a cognitive test. These confidence ratings are conceptually linked both to cognitive acts (answering a test item) and aspects of personality (confidence in the accuracy of one's answer). They have good psychometric properties and, when compared to the accuracy scores, indicate what one "knows and does not know" about his or her cognitive performance-i.e., they inform about a person's metacognitive processes. In this chapter, we review recent findings with confidence ratings and Realism (i.e., accuracy) of confidence ratings and links that these processes may have with personality and/or cognitive ability dimensions.