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.