---
title: "Irwin & Mandel (2023) frame their lab finding as cohering with a pattern Friedman & Zeckhauser (2012) had already found in declassified intelligence products"
type: "claim"
status: "seedling"
audit_status: "capture-verified | 2026-08-13 cross-model audit (claude-opus-5, writer was claude-sonnet-5): source_quote found verbatim in the accepted manuscript's General Discussion, as is the Friedman & Zeckhauser (2018) counterpoint the note also quotes, in the order the note gives them. The bibliographic detail is confirmed from the paper's own reference list: 'Friedman, J. A., & Zeckhauser, R. (2012). Assessing uncertainty in intelligence. Intelligence and National Security, 27(6), 824-847', exactly as recorded, and the 2018 item as 'Analytic confidence and political decision-making: Theoretical principles and experimental evidence from national security professionals. Political Psychology, 39(5), 1069-1087'. This DISCHARGES the open NO MATCH flag raised against this note by seek_verify in 00-meta/reports/verify-2026-08-12.md, which classed the quote as 'artifact/fabrication class' — the cause was URL drift, not fabrication (see below). ONE OVER-READ CORRECTED the same day: title, heading and opening sentence said Irwin & Mandel present the finding as 'corroborating, not discovering'. The source supports the corroboration half only — immediately before the quoted sentence the authors write 'Critically, we found that intelligence consumers do not treat confidence and probability as independent constructs', i.e. they do claim the finding as their own; what they do not claim is that the ground was untouched. Wording narrowed to what the source carries; prior wording preserved here. POINTER CAVEAT: source_url now 301s to https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/hwp5r, whose primary file is a .docx, so the URL resolves to the preprint record but no longer serves a fetchable PDF, and the Wiley version of record returns HTTP 402 to automated fetch. An independent re-download was therefore not possible and the status is deliberately NOT upgraded to verified-verbatim; source_venue added so the citation reaches the version of record."
source_url: "https://psyarxiv.com/hwp5r"
source_author: "Daniel Irwin, David R. Mandel"
source_date: 2023
source_venue: "PsyArXiv preprint (accepted manuscript, marked 'In press: Risk Analysis'); version of record: Risk Analysis 43(5):943-957, 2023, doi:10.1111/risa.14009"
source_quote: "findings cohere with evidence from declassified intelligence products that analysts conflate ordinal confidence ratings with event probabilities (Friedman & Zeckhauser, 2012)."
source_tier: 1
source_sha: "2848a23bbd421bf10eb93d5daa33781dadf8d515b7abd8a3f23c4c43eee89058"
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-does-irwin-mandel-2023-actually-show-that-intelligence.md, 2026-08-11"
origin: "batch"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
derived_from: ["10-inbox/raw/2026-08-11-does-irwin-mandel-2023-actually-show-that-intelligence.md"]
date_created: "2026-08-11T00:00:00.000Z"
tags: ["intelligence-tradecraft","epistemics","probability-confidence","david-r-mandel","source-evaluation"]
seek_code_commit: "b13747c"
---


Irwin & Mandel claim [[claim-irwin-mandel-2023-confidence-shifts-inferred-probability|their laboratory conflation of confidence and probability]] as their own headline result — "Critically, we found that intelligence consumers do not treat confidence and probability as independent constructs" — but in the next breath situate it against an earlier, non-experimental evidence source rather than presenting the ground as untouched: "findings cohere with evidence from declassified intelligence products that analysts conflate ordinal confidence ratings with event probabilities (Friedman & Zeckhauser, 2012)." That earlier work — Friedman, J. A., & Zeckhauser, R. (2012), "Assessing uncertainty in intelligence," *Intelligence and National Security*, 27(6), 824–847 — examined real declassified assessments rather than lab-elicited judgments, and is the field's real-world anchor for the same claim this vault's lab-derived notes track. Irwin & Mandel also note a partial counterpoint from the same author pair's later work — "previous research suggests that experts and non-experts can distinguish between probability and specific components of confidence (Friedman & Zeckhauser, 2018)" — before arguing their own results show the disjunction fails in practice regardless.

This gives the [[moc-two-axes-that-wont-stay-independent|two-axes cluster]] its one instance of triangulation across method: a lab manipulation (Irwin & Mandel) and a field/archival study (Friedman & Zeckhauser) converging on the same conflation, rather than the cluster's more usual pattern of one paper's finding standing alone. Neither Friedman & Zeckhauser paper has been read at primary by this vault; this note records only Irwin & Mandel's own framing of that earlier work, not an independent verification of it.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> Worth being precise about what this note does and doesn't establish: it's evidence that Irwin & Mandel *believe* their result matches Friedman & Zeckhauser's, not evidence that it does — I'm one citation away from the actual archival study, and a paraphrase of someone else's framing of their own finding is exactly the layer the vault's sourcing floor exists to flag. Still, a Tier-1 author's own stated relationship to prior work is a real fact worth recording, and it's the reason this vault's confidence/probability thread has a field-evidence pointer at all, even an unread one.
> — Seek