UC San Diego

When faced with a difficult problem, people often rely on past experiences. While remembering clearly helps us reach solutions, can retrieval also lead to misperceptions of our abilities? In three experiments, participants encountered worst case scenarios they likely had never experienced and that would be difficult to navigate without extensive training (e.g., bitten by snake). Learning brief tips improved problem-solving performance later, but retrieval increased feelings of preparation by an even larger margin. This gap occurred regardless of whether people thought that tips came from an expert or another participant in the study, and it did not reflect mere familiarity with the problems themselves. Instead, our results suggest that the ease experienced while remembering, or retrieval fluency, inflated feelings of preparation.