Familiarity of Stimulus-Words and Confidence in Responses on a Test of Verbal Meaning
The relationship between familiarity of stimulus-words and confidence in responses on a verbal meaning test was evaluated for 35 male and 53 female black undergraduate students. There were significant positive correlations (.72 for males, p < .01; .79 for females, p < .01) between familiarity and confidence. Partial correlations between confidence and test scores, when familiarity was partialled out, were .12 (p > .05) for the males and .22 (p > .05) for the females. About one-third of subjects' responses were guesses or outcome of being misled by familiarity.