SEARCH SUCCESS AND EXPECTATIONS WITH A COMPUTER-INTERFACE

People's expectations for success can affect their use of information sources in a variety of ways, including their willingness to search at all, their satisfaction (or frustration) with the success that they encounter, and their confidence in the completeness of their search for specific items. An earlier study using a pencil-and-paper format found people to be overconfident in their ability to locate various items in two entry-level menus to The Statistical Abstract of the United States. In addition, their performance was considerably better with a broad menu, comprised of the 33 chapters in the Abstract, than with a narrow one, comprised of 8 superordinate categories. The present study transferred this task to a computer-interactive format. Surprisingly, neither the transfer itself nor the introduction of performance feedback affected the realism of subjects' expectations. A review of the two studies, involving 481 subjects in all, in the context of the general psychological literature on confidence assessment, provides some suggestions regarding the design of interfaces for computerized data bases. © 1987.