Speakers’ Overestimation of Their Effectiveness

Speakers overestimated how clearly they had conveyed an intention; informed overhearers did not show the same bias.

Keysar, B. & Henly, A. S. (2002). Speakers’ Overestimation of Their Effectiveness. Psychological Science, 13(3), 207–212.

Type

Journal article

Find it

doi.org/10.1111/1467-9280.00439

Checked

Against the abstract, 16 September 2026

Why it is on the list

Participants said ambiguous sentences while trying to convey one specific intention, then estimated whether their addressee had understood. They consistently overestimated: they expected to be understood more often than they actually were. Overhearers who knew the speaker’s intention did not systematically overestimate. Being the one who spoke is what produces the error.

The authors’ account: speakers monitoring their own utterances do not act as unbiased observers. They underestimate how ambiguous their own sentence was, and overestimate how much their own disambiguating cues made the intention transparent. They close by calling this a systematic source of miscommunication in ordinary conversation.

Week 3 uses this when asking senders to check how a hint landed. Confidence in the intended meaning does not tell the sender what the other person understood.