Scholars@Duke
Jack B. Soll

Jack B. Soll

Gregory Mario and Jeremy Mario Distinguished Professor
Fuqua School of Business
jsoll@duke.edu
Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708-0120
A209 Fuqua School of Bus, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications

Editorial Statement—Behavioral Economics and Decision Analysis

Journal Article Management Science · August 1, 2024 Full text Cite

The Social Psychology of the Wisdom of Crowds (with a New Section on Recent Advances)

Chapter · January 1, 2024 This chapter reviews the “wisdom of crowds” through the lens of social psychology. Early research on social influence cast a pessimistic light on whether collectives can be wise. The famous Asch (1955) studies left the impression that collective judgment i ... Full text Cite

Encouraging self-blinding in hiring

Journal Article Behavioral Science and Policy · January 1, 2023 One strategy for minimizing bias in hiring is blinding—purposefully limiting the information used when screening applicants to that which is directly relevant to the job and does not elicit bias based on race, gender, age, or other irrelevant characteristi ... Full text Cite

When and why people perform mindless math

Journal Article Judgment and Decision Making · November 1, 2022 In this paper, we show that the presence of numbers in a problem tempts people to perform mathematical operations even when the correct answer requires no math, which we term “mindless math”. In three pre-registered studies across two survey platforms (tot ... Cite

Blinding curiosity: Exploring preferences for “blinding” one's own judgment

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · May 1, 2022 We perform the first tests of individual-level preferences for “blinding” in decision making: purposefully restricting the information one sees in order to form a more objective evaluation. For example, when grading her students’ papers, a professor might ... Full text Cite

The Bad Thing About Good Advice: Understanding When and How Advice Exacerbates Overconfidence

Journal Article Management Science · April 1, 2022 Much research on advice taking examines how people revise point estimates given input from others. This work has established that people often egocentrically discount advice. If they were to place more weight on advice, their point estimates would be more ... Full text Cite

Why Putting On Blinders Can Help Us See More Clearly

Journal Article MIT Sloan Management Review · June 1, 2021 Cite

Comparing fast thinking and slow thinking: The relative benefits of interventions, individual differences, and inferential rules

Journal Article Judgment and Decision Making · September 1, 2020 Research on judgment and decision making has suggested that the System 2 process of slow thinking can help people to improve their decision making by reducing well-established statistical decision biases (including base rate neglect, probability matching, ... Cite

Extracting the wisdom of crowds when information is shared

Journal Article Management Science · May 1, 2019 Using the wisdom of crowds-combining many individual judgments to obtain an aggregate estimate-can be an effective technique for improving judgment accuracy. In practice, however, accuracy is limited by the presence of correlated judgment errors, which oft ... Full text Cite

Advice as a form of social influence: Informational motives and the consequences for accuracy

Journal Article Social and Personality Psychology Compass · August 1, 2017 In this article, we ask how well people fulfill informational motives by using the judgments of others. We build on advice-taking research from the judgment and decision making literature, which has developed a distinct paradigm to test how accurately peop ... Full text Cite

Outsmart Your Own Biases

Journal Article HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW · May 1, 2015 Link to item Cite

Pushing away from representative advice: Advice taking, anchoring, and adjustment

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 2015 Five studies compare the effects of forming an independent judgment prior to receiving advice with the effects of receiving advice before forming one's own opinion. We call these the independent-then-revise sequence and the dependent sequence, respectively ... Full text Cite

Outsmart your own biases

Journal Article Harvard Business Review · January 1, 2015 Cite

The wisdom of select crowds.

Journal Article Journal of personality and social psychology · August 2014 Social psychologists have long recognized the power of statisticized groups. When individual judgments about some fact (e.g., the unemployment rate for next quarter) are averaged together, the average opinion is typically more accurate than most of the ind ... Full text Cite

Consumer misunderstanding of credit card use

Journal Article Journal of Public Policy and Marketing · January 1, 2013 The authors identify several judgmental biases related to paying off credit card debt. Participants with stronger numerical skills made fewer errors, as did those who used the new statement format mandated by Congress in the CARD Act of 2009. Study 1 shows ... Full text Cite

The detrimental effects of power on confidence, advice taking, and accuracy

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · November 1, 2011 Incorporating input from others can enhance decision quality, yet often people do not effectively utilize advice. We propose that greater power increases the propensity to discount advice, and that a key mechanism explaining this effect is elevated confide ... Full text Cite

Judgmental aggregation strategies depend on whether the self is involved

Journal Article International Journal of Forecasting · January 1, 2011 We report the results of a novel experiment that addresses two unresolved questions in the judgmental forecasting literature. First, how does combining the estimates of others differ from revising one's own estimate based on the judgment of another? The ex ... Full text Cite

Powerful and unpersuaded: The implications of power for confidence, advice taking, and accuracy

Conference Academy of Management 2010 Annual Meeting - Dare to Care: Passion and Compassion in Management Practice and Research, AOM 2010 · December 1, 2010 We investigate the relationships between power, confidence, and advice taking. In a field survey, working professionals from a variety of organizations provided self-ratings of power and confidence, and their advice taking behavior was rated by a set of th ... Cite

Powerful and unpersuaded: The implications of power for confidence, advice taking, and accuracy

Journal Article Academy of Management 2010 Annual Meeting - Dare to Care: Passion and Compassion in Management Practice and Research, AOM 2010 · December 1, 2010 We investigate the relationships between power, confidence, and advice taking. In a field survey, working professionals from a variety of organizations provided self-ratings of power and confidence, and their advice taking behavior was rated by a set of th ... Cite

Powerful and unpersuaded: The implications of power for confidence, advice taking, and accuracy

Conference Academy of Management Annual Meeting Proceedings · January 1, 2010 We investigate the relationships between power, confidence, and advice taking. In a field survey, working professionals from a variety of organizations provided self-ratings of power and confidence, and their advice taking behavior was rated by a set of th ... Full text Cite

Strategies for revising judgment: how (and how well) people use others' opinions.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · May 2009 A basic issue in social influence is how best to change one's judgment in response to learning the opinions of others. This article examines the strategies that people use to revise their quantitative estimates on the basis of the estimates of another pers ... Full text Cite

A blind spot in driving decisions: How neglecting costs puts us in overdrive

Journal Article Climatic Change · January 1, 2009 This article discusses how people often neglect the financial costs associated with driving. As a consequence they take trips that are contrary to their own self-interest and cause unnecessary harm to the environment through carbon emissions. Two empirical ... Full text Cite

Economics. The MPG illusion.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · June 2008 Full text Cite

Inferences of Interpersonal Preference Similarity Based on Unrelated Product Categories

Conference ADVANCES IN CONSUMER RESEARCH, VOL 35 · January 1, 2008 Link to item Cite

Social comparison and confidence: When thinking you're better than average predicts overconfidence (and when it does not)

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 2007 A common social comparison bias-the better-than-average-effect-is frequently described as psychologically equivalent to the individual-level judgment bias known as overconfidence. However, research has found "Hard-easy" effects for each bias that yield a s ... Full text Cite

"Sampling, Overconfidence, and Consumer Decisions"

Conference ADVANCES IN CONSUMER RESEARCH VOL XXXIV · January 1, 2007 Link to item Cite

Intuitions about combining opinions: Misappreciation of the averaging principle

Journal Article Management Science · January 1, 2006 Averaging estimates is an effective way to improve accuracy when combining expert judgments, integrating group members' judgments, or using advice to modify personal judgments. If the estimates of two judges ever fall on different sides of the truth, which ... Full text Cite

Overconfidence in interval estimates.

Journal Article Journal of experimental psychology. Learning, memory, and cognition · March 2004 Judges were asked to make numerical estimates (e.g., "In what year was the first flight of a hot air balloon?"). Judges provided high and low estimates such that they were X% sure that the correct answer lay between them. They exhibited substantial overcon ... Full text Cite

Overconfidence: It Depends on How, What, and Whom You Ask.

Journal Article Organizational behavior and human decision processes · September 1999 Many studies have reported that the confidence people have in their judgments exceeds their accuracy and that overconfidence increases with the difficulty of the task. However, some common analyses confound systematic psychological effects with statistical ... Full text Cite

Intuitive theories of information: beliefs about the value of redundancy.

Journal Article Cognitive psychology · March 1999 In many situations, quantity estimates from multiple experts or diagnostic instruments must be collected and combined. Normatively, and all else equal, one should value information sources that are nonredundant, in the sense that correlation in forecast er ... Full text Cite

Mental budgeting and consumer decisions

Journal Article Journal of Consumer Research · June 1, 1996 Consumers often set budgets for categories of expenses (e.g., entertainment) and track expenses against their budget. Because budgets cannot perfectly anticipate consumption opportunities, people may earmark too much or too little money for a particular ca ... Full text Cite

Which reference class is evoked?

Journal Article Behavioral and Brain Sciences · March 1996 AbstractAny instance (i.e., event, behavior, trait) belongs to infinitely many reference classes, hence there are infinitely many base rates from which to choose. People clearly do not entertain all possible reference class ... Full text Cite

Determinants of overconfidence and miscalibration: The roles of random error and ecological structure

Journal Article Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes · January 1, 1996 Previous authors have attributed findings of overconfidence to psychological bias or to experimental designs unrepresentative of the environment. This paper provides evidence for an alternative explanation. A model is presented in which reported confidence ... Full text Cite