The COVID-19 pandemic is a serious threat that produces harm to people around the globe. Prior work has almost exclusively focused on deconstructive consequences of the novel coronavirus, the present research reveals a bright side of the coronavirus outbreak: reduce the overconfidence bias in non-health domains. In Experiment 1, students passed by a trained confederate who was coughing loudly or not and completed a peer-comparison problem measuring their overconfidence bias. The results showed that participants, who were exposed to a salient health threat, displayed a lower level of overconfidence than did participants in the control condition. Experiment 2 recapitulated the effects of public coughing on overconfidence by using a non-student sample and an alternative measure of overconfidence. Across two field experiments, we replicated prior findings regarding sex differences for the overconfidence bias. Taken together, our research suggests that whereas the COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly ravaged nations and economies, the unprecedented crisis offers an opportunity for individuals to counteract their overconfidence in judgment and decision-making.

COVID-19 大流行是对全球人民造成伤害的严重威胁。之前的工作几乎完全集中在新型冠状病毒的破坏性后果上，目前的研究揭示了冠状病毒爆发的光明面：减少非健康领域的过度自信偏见。在实验 1 中，学生从一个训练有素的同伴身边经过，这个同伴是否大声咳嗽，并完成了一个衡量他们过度自信偏差的同伴比较问题。结果表明，暴露于显着健康威胁的参与者比控制条件下的参与者表现出更低水平的过度自信。实验 2 通过使用非学生样本和过度自信的替代衡量标准，概括了公共场合咳嗽对过度自信的影响。在两个田间试验中，我们复制了先前关于过度自信偏见的性别差异的发现。综上所述，我们的研究表明，尽管 COVID-19 大流行无疑已经摧毁了国家和经济，但这场前所未有的危机为个人提供了一个机会来抵消他们在判断和决策方面的过度自信。