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Given that people had a bimodal distribution of confidence, I would assume that means a lot of the perceived overconfidence come from people answering a question wrong that they thought was easy. I wonder if the test takers would say “that was a trick question”.

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Yeah I'm going through https://www.congap.com/ and I see quite a few questions where the correct answer is often the one that goes against intuition. Thus, low information responders might make a reasoned guess and assign somewhat greater than 50% confidence when in reality they have a less than 50% chance of getting it right.

Incidentally, I pretty quickly learned to guess the most unusual answer for questions I have no direct information about.

> Incidentally, I pretty quickly learned to guess the most unusual answer for questions I have no direct information about.

I suspect that's a strategy many people who are both educated and intelligent would pick up on.

Yeah, I had the thought that the math might work out in such a way that this is the expected result.

That is, if you say you are "50%" confident, it really means you have no confidence - simply guessing would get you 50%, so you can't go less than that. But on the other end, for people who say they're 100% or 95% confident, it's pretty much all downside since you can't go over 100%.

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