The CRT is an increasingly well-known and used test of biassusceptibility. While alternatives are being developed, theoriginal remains in widespread use and this has led to itsbecoming increasingly familiar to psychology students(Stieger & Reips, 2016), resulting in inflated scores.Extending this work, we measure the effect of prior exposureto the CRT in a sample of oil industry professionals. Theseengineers and geoscientists completed the CRT, seven biastasks and rated their familiarity with all of these. Key resultswere that: familiarity increased CRT scores but tended not toreduce bias susceptibility; and industry personnel, evenwithout prior CRT exposure, scored very highly on the CRT -greatly reducing its predictive power. Conclusions are that thestandard CRT is not a useful tool for assessing biassusceptibility in highly numerate professionals – and doublyso when they have previously been exposed.

Overconfidence is the tendency for people to underestimate the true range of uncertainty regarding unknown or future values. It results in observed outcomes falling outside people’s estimated ranges more often than their stated confidence would suggest. Previous research has, however, demonstrated various ways of reducing this bias and the More-Or-Less-Elicitation (MOLE) tool has been designed to take these into account while leading people through an elicitation. Previous research showed MOLE’s benefit on a visual estimation task but real world elicitation is more likely to involve forecasting future values. The current study compared forecast ranges, for 7 and 28 day windows, elicited via the MOLE and direct estimation. A significant reduction in overconfidence (the mismatch between stated confidence and the proportion of ranges containing the true value) was observed – from more than 25% to only 7%. We conclude that the MOLE is a useful tool for assisting forecasting.

Many industry professionals are poorly calibrated, overestimatingtheir ability to make accurate forecasts. Previous research hasdemonstrated that an individual’s calibration in a specific domaincan be improved through calibration training in that domain;however devising a training program for each specific domainwithin a field is laborious. A more efficient method would be ifindividuals from different disciplines could undertake the samegeneral training and transfer the skills learnt to their respective,specific domains. This study investigated whether calibrationtraining in a general domain was transferable to the specificdomain of petroleum engineering. The results showed that, whilstthe feedback training was effective within the general domain,there was only limited transfer to the specific domain. This isargued to be due to recognition failure, where the participantsfailed to recognise that the skill learnt through training in thegeneral domain could be transferred to the specific domain.

Risk communication, where scientists inform policy-makersor the populace of the probability and magnitude of possibledisasters, is essential to disaster management – enablingpeople to make better decisions regarding preventative steps,evacuations, etc. Psychological research, however, hasidentified multiple biases that can affect people’sinterpretation of probabilities and thus risk. For example,availability (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973) is known toconfound probability estimates while the description-experience gap (D-E Gap) (Hertwig & Erev, 2009) shows lowprobability events being over-weighted when described andunder-weighted when learnt from laboratory tasks. This paperexamines how probability descriptions interact with realworld experience of events. Responses from 294 participantsacross 8 conditions showed that people’s responses, given thesame described probabilities and consequences, were alteredby their familiarity with the disaster (bushfire vs earthquake)and its salience to them personally. The implications of thisfor risk communication are discussed.