ASSOCIATION FOR CONSUMER RESEARCH Labovitz School of Business & Economics, University of Minnesota Duluth, 11 E. Superior Street, Suite 210, Duluth, MN 55802 On the Psychology of Confidence - the Effects of Fluency and Construal Level on Confidence Judgments Claire Tsai, University of Toronto, Canada Ann McGill, University of Chicago, USA Confidence judgments are systematically influenced by retrieval fluency and processing fluency. The fluency effects, however, are moderated by construal level. At low construal levels, fluency informs the feasibility of achieving the outcome but at high construal levels fluency informs the desirability of the outcome. In three studies, we manipulated fluency by varying the number of reasons generated or the typeface. As predicted, fluency increases confidence for people processing at lower construal levels, but it decreases confidence for those processing at higher construal levels. [to cite]: Claire Tsai and Ann McGill (2010) ,"On the Psychology of Confidence - the Effects of Fluency and Construal Level on Confidence Judgments", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 37, eds. Margaret C. Campbell, Jeff Inman, and Rik Pieters, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 227-231 . [url]: http://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/15504/volumes/v37/NA-37 [copyright notice]: This work is copyrighted by The Association for Consumer Research. For permission to copy or use this work in whole or in part, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at http://www.copyright.com/.