David G. Dobolyi

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Assistant Professor at University of Colorado Boulder

Is confidence most diagnostic of accuracy when expressed in numbers or when expressed in words? This question bears immense importance in many real-world contexts especially within the confines of eyewitness identification. In an eyewitness identification task, we compared the diagnostic value of numeric confidence across rating scales that varied...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is playing an increasing role in human decision making. We use eyewitness lineup identification to show when AI assistance can and cannot help people avoid a cognitive bias known as the featural justification effect. People are biased to judge highly confident eyewitnesses as less likely to be correct when their lineup...

Digital experiments are routinely used to test the value of a treatment relative to a status quo control setting — for instance, a new search relevance algorithm for a website or a new results layout for a mobile app. As digital experiments have become increasingly pervasive in organizations and a wide variety of research areas, their growth has pr...

Phishing is a significant security concern for organizations, threatening employees and members of the public. Phishing threats against employees can lead to severe security incidents, whereas those against the public can undermine trust, satisfaction, and brand equity. At the root of the problem is the inability of Internet users to identify phish...

Phishing websites become a critical cybersecurity threat affecting individuals and organizations. Phishing-website detection tools are designed to protect users against such sites. Nevertheless, detection tools face serious user trust and suboptimal performance issues which require trust calibration to align trust with the tool’s capabilities. We e...

When pristine testing conditions are used, an eyewitness's high-confidence identification from a lineup can be a reliable predictor of their identification accuracy (Wixted & Wells, 2017). Further, Grabman, Dobolyi, Berelovich, and Dodson (2019) found that high-confidence identifications are more predictive of accuracy for individuals with stronger...

Psychometric measures of ability, attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs are crucial for understanding user behaviors in various contexts including health, security, e-commerce, and finance. Traditionally, psychometric dimensions have been measured and collected using survey-based methods. Inferring such constructs from user-generated text could affor...

When pristine testing conditions are used, an eyewitness’s high-confidence identification from a lineup can be a reliable predictor of their identification accuracy (Wixted & Wells, 2017). Further, Grabman, Dobolyi, Berelovich, and Dodson (2019) found that high-confidence identifications are more predictive of accuracy for individuals with stronger...

Psychometric measures reflecting people’s knowledge, ability, attitudes, and personality traits are critical for many real-world applications, such as e-commerce, health care, and cybersecurity. However, traditional methods cannot collect and measure rich psychometric dimensions in a timely and unobtrusive manner. Consequently, despite their import...

This research examines the roles of health literacy, health numeracy, and trust in doctor on: 1) patient anxiety when consulting a doctor; 2) frequency of physician consultations; and 3) patient subjective well‐being (SWB). Our sample consisted of 4,040 adults representative of the U.S. in terms of age, income, and education, but equally split amon...

General Audience Summary When an eyewitness chooses a face from a criminal lineup, police are instructed to ask the witness how confident they are in this decision (e.g., 0–100% certain). Increasing research suggests that high eyewitness confidence is a reliable indicator of accuracy (Wixted & Wells, 2017), yet highly confident witnesses are someti...

Increasing research shows that high eyewitness confidence at the time of an initial identification is a strong predictor of accuracy (Wixted & Wells, 2017). However, as with all forms of criminal evidence, this relationship is imperfect. This study addresses whether there are variables that systematically influence the rate of high confidence misid...

This article documents a contradiction between objective eyewitness accuracy and perceived eyewitness accuracy. Objectively, eyewitness identification accuracy (and the confidence-accuracy relationship) is comparably strong when a lineup identification is accompanied by a justification that refers to either an observable feature about the suspect (...

As more firms adopt big data analytics to better understand their customers and differentiate their offerings from competitors, it becomes increasingly difficult to generate strategic value from isolated and unfocused ad hoc initiatives. To attain sustainable competitive advantage from big data, firms must achieve agility in combining rich data acr...

Jurors are heavily swayed by confident eyewitnesses. Are they also influenced by how eyewitnesses justify their level of confidence? Here we document a counter-intuitive effect: When eyewitnesses identified a suspect from a lineup with absolute certainty (“I am completely confident”) and justified their confidence by referring to a visible feature...

The number of active, online phishing websites continues to grow unabated in recent years. This has created an ever-increasing security risk for both individual and enterprise users in terms of identity theft, malware, financial loss, etc. Although resources exist for tracking, cataloguing, and blacklisting these types of sites (e.g., PhishTank.com...

Advancing age and disease duration both contribute to cortical thinning in Parkinson's disease (PD), but the pathological interactions between them are poorly described. This study aims to distinguish patterns of cortical decline determined by advancing age and disease duration in PD. A convenience cohort of 177 consecutive PD patients, identified...

Participants encountered same-race and cross-race faces at encoding, completed a series of line-up identification tests and provided confidence ratings by using one of nine different confidence scales. Confidence was less well calibrated with identification accuracy when participants selected a cross-race than a same-race face because of overconfid...

Empirically analyzing empirical evidence One of the central goals in any scientific endeavor is to understand causality. Experiments that seek to demonstrate a cause/effect relation most often manipulate the postulated causal factor. Aarts et al. describe the replication of 100 experiments reported in papers published in 2008 in three high-ranking...

Theories of learning styles suggest that individuals think and learn best in different ways. These are not differences of ability but rather preferences for processing certain types of information or for processing information in certain types of way. If accurate, learning styles theories could have important implications for instruction because st...

How do we know eyewitness statements of confidence are interpreted accurately by others? When eyewitnesses provide a verbal expression of confidence about a lineup identification, such as I'm fairly certain it's him, how well do others understand the intended meaning of this statement of confidence? And, how is this perception of the meaning influe...

Confidence judgments for eyewitness identifications play an integral role in determining guilt during legal proceedings. Past research has shown that confidence in positive identifications is strongly associated with accuracy. Using a standard lineup recognition paradigm, we investigated accuracy using signal detection and ROC analyses, along with...