I Knew It All Along, Unless I Had to Work to Learn What I Know

Abstract

After receiving knowledge regarding some topic, people usually overestimate their prior topic knowledge. Two experiments investigated whether people would claim less prior knowledge if they worked to earn their present knowledge. In Study 1, students finishing a psychology course claimed less precourse psychology knowledge if they reported devoting more effort toward the course. In Study 2, the knew-it-all-along effect was stronger for participants who were simply given the answers to questions than for participants who studied for 20 minutes to learn the answers. Both cognitive and motivational factors can account for the observed effects of effort investment on retrospective knowledge judgments.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Alison Borin, Shannon Bowen, Stephany Gordon, Alyson Knapp, Kyle Mihalski, Megan Peet, Megan Pollard, and Meredith Terry for their important contributions to this research program.

Notes

¹The knew-it-all-along effect is a close cousin to hindsight bias, but some researchers (e.g., Hertwig, Gigerenzer, & Hoffrage, 1997) have argued convincingly that the term hindsight bias should be reserved for references to memory judgments (“What judgment did you make before?”), whereas the knew-it-all-along effect label should only be applied to hypothetical judgments (“What judgment would you have made before?”). According to this standard, our research methods relate more closely to the knew-it-all-along effect than to hindsight bias.

²The retrospective judgments made by Study 1 participants are best described as hypothetical judgments, because participants were asked to report the responses they would have made at the beginning of the semester. Participants were not asked to repeat the responses they made five weeks previously, as would be the case for a memory judgment. We avoided having participants make memory judgments because we reasoned that they would have difficulty remembering specific responses they provided five weeks previously (the time lag in memory judgment studies between Time 1 judgments and recollections of Time 1 judgments is often shorter than five weeks). However, because studies of the knew-it-all-along effect traditionally do not require participants to make Time 1 judgments before later making hypothetical judgments of their prior knowledge, the procedure used in Study 1 could be viewed as a hybrid of memory and hypothetical judgment methods.

³The retrospective knowledge judgments of Effort Condition participants in Study 2 were unrelated to differences in reported effort, r(17)=.02, and level of perceived challenge, r(17) = − .01. Although perceived difficulty of study materials was not expected to moderate the relationship between effort and retrospective judgments, the lack of relationship between the effort manipulation check responses and retrospective judgments may seem surprising when compared with the linear relationship observed between subjective effort and judgments of past knowledge in Study 1. However, the validity of this comparison is compromised by differences in the content of the subjective effort items and also by the range restriction problem in Study 2 (the effort manipulation check item was only administered to the minority of participants who had to invest effort studying).