{"id":120,"date":"2012-06-12T22:15:00","date_gmt":"2012-06-12T22:15:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/measuringu.com\/overconfident-men\/"},"modified":"2022-03-21T18:24:32","modified_gmt":"2022-03-22T00:24:32","slug":"overconfident-men","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/measuringu.com\/overconfident-men\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Men Overconfident Users?"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>There are some interesting known differences between men and women in the psychological literature.<\/p>\n For example, women tend to be better judges of emotion when looking at faces for just 0.2 of a second[pdf]<\/span><\/a>!<\/p>\n And across many measures of ability, while both men and women tend to exhibit overconfidence, men are generally more overconfident than women<\/a>\u00a0 and this is especially the case when men do things incorrectly<\/span>.<\/p>\n But does this also apply to the user experience on websites?<\/p>\n As part of our usability tests we ask users how confident they are they completed the task successfully on a 7 point scale.\u00a0 When users rate that they are extremely confident (a 7) yet fail the task it’s a disaster.<\/a> Not surprisingly, you want to minimize disasters in the user experience. We wanted to know though, are men overconfident in their assessment of task success?<\/p>\n To find out I aggregated data across five recent task-based website usability evaluations where we collected confidence scores.\u00a0 In total we had 38 tasks and 881 total participants: 55% Women and 45% men.\u00a0 Across all studies we had 5246 task attempts to analyze.<\/p>\n Overall, men and women completed roughly the same proportion of tasks successfully: Women completed 63% and Men Completed 62% of task attempts successfully (no statistical difference).<\/p>\n There also wasn’t a significant difference in the average confidence ratings between men and women. On a 7 point scale where 7 is extremely confident, men on average rated their confidence in completing the task as 5.47 and women at 5.45.<\/p>\n However, things got interesting when we looked at failed task attempts. When tasks attempts weren’t successful, men were more confident than women<\/span> that they actually completed the task successfully!<\/p>\n Men’s average confidence was 6% higher than women’s (p=.02) 4.3 (sd=2.2) vs. 4.1 (sd=2.3).<\/p>\n In other words, while both sexes were overconfident in the face of task failure, men were even more overconfident.<\/p>\n So in addition to men insisting they know where they’re going even though they’re lost, you can add overconfidence in completing tasks online to the list.<\/p>\nMeasuring Confidence<\/h2>\n
\nFigure 1: <\/span>When users fail a task, men are about 6% more confident than women that they completed the task successfully. Error bars are 90% confidence intervals.<\/span><\/p>\n