The Confidence Database

Understanding how people rate their confidence is critical for characterizing a wide range of perceptual, memory, motor, and cognitive processes. However, as in many other fields, progress has been slowed by the difficulty of collecting new data and the unavailability of existing data. To address this issue, we created a large database of confidence studies spanning a broad set of paradigms, participant populations, and fields of study. The data from each study are structured in a common, easy-to-use format that can be easily imported and analyzed in multiple software packages. Each dataset is further accompanied by an explanation regarding the nature of the collected data. At the time of publication, the Confidence Database (available at osf.io/s46pr) contained 145 datasets with data from over 8,700 participants and almost 4 million trials. The database will remain open for new submissions indefinitely and is expected to continue to grow. We show the usefulness of this large collection of datasets in four different analyses that provide precise estimation for several foundational confidence-related effects and lead to new findings that depend on the availability of large quantity of data. This Confidence Database will continue to enable new discoveries and can serve as a blueprint for similar databases in related fields.