Hard-Easy Effect

The hard-easy effect is a cognitive bias in which people overestimate how likely they are to succeed on difficult tasks while underestimating their likelihood of success on easy ones. The researchers Katherine Burson, Richard Larrick and Jack Soll documented the pattern in a 2005 study, finding that hard tasks tend to produce overconfidence together with a sense of being worse than average, while easy tasks tend to produce underconfidence together with a sense of being better than average. The effect connects to the psychologist Leon Festinger's 1954 theory of social comparison, which describes how people gauge their own abilities by comparing themselves with others, and it has been described under other names by other researchers, including the discriminability effect, named by Ferrell and McGoey in 1980, and the difficulty effect, named by Griffin and Tversky in 1992. In a typical demonstration, participants answer general-knowledge questions with two possible answers and rate their confidence in each answer, and their confidence is consistently lower than warranted on easy questions and higher than warranted on hard ones, the reverse of what accurate self-assessment would predict.