A final investigation suggested that while overclaiming may be influenced by an existing
abundance of related concepts in a person’s mind, it can also be produced simply by
heightening a person’s confidence in their knowledge. Participants took a quiz on US
geography before the actual test of overclaiming (based on the same topic). When the quiz
was constructed to be easy, giving participants the feeling they had a good grasp of
geography, they went on to overclaim more. It suggests that merely feeling like an expert also
sways our evaluation of ambiguous cues firmly towards the “seen it!” camp.