Research

In various critical scenarios, individuals must assess their strengths and weaknesses to make well-informed decisions. Whether starting a new business venture or embarking on a career change, being aware of one's abilities is of utmost importance. While individuals' metacognition often provides them with reliable self-evaluations, it can fail at times. Recent studies have shed light on individuals' capacity to recognize such metacognitive failures, an ability termed meta-metacognition. This paper presents the first experimental examination of the significance of meta-metacognition in decision-making by investigating its impact on individuals' demand for feedback about their own ability, in situations where self-knowledge is crucial. To explore this issue, we adopt a modified version of Niederle & Vesterlund (2007)'s experimental paradigm, where individuals have to decide between a competitive and non-competitive scheme to compensate for their work—a decision relying on accurate self-knowledge. Within this setup, we introduce the opportunity for participants to buy feedback regarding their own ability.  We show that metacognitive sensitivity provides benefits for individuals in this setup, as highly sensitive participants secure higher earnings and make better decisions. In addition, we report two seemingly contradictory findings. Surprisingly, when individuals distrust their metacognition, they still tend to rely on it. Concurrently, we observe an increase in their demand for feedback, which seems to compensate for their poor metacognition. To establish causal evidence for these observations, we  implement an intervention designed to decrease participants' confidence in their own metacognition. Our findings demonstrate that this intervention significantly increases their willingness to buy feedback but do not alter the way they rely on their metacognition.  Overall, our results point towards a more nuanced understanding of how individuals form beliefs about their own abilities and how these beliefs shape their behavior.

The ability to form judgments about one's own cognitive abilities, i.e. metacognition, has been extensively studied recently. Metacognitive judgments are not always accurate, but little is known about whether individuals can evaluate the quality of their own metacognition.  We present here three experiments aimed at exploring this ability, which is termed meta-metacognition, in the context of a perceptual task. Observers were asked to judge which of two perceptual decisions was more likely to be correct (i.e. a metacognitive choice) and to evaluate their confidence in such choices (i.e. a meta-metacognitive judgment). We document three main findings. First, meta-metacognitive judgments could indeed predict the quality of metacognitive choices. Second, further analyses show that the information contained in such meta-metacognitive judgments cannot be reduced to the information that can be optimally extracted from the metacognitive level. Third, we also found an intriguing inconsistency between two types of metacognitive reports: participants' metacognitive choices contradicted their ratings of perceptual confidence in nearly 25% of cases, and when this happened participants' metacognitive accuracy mostly improved.  Overall, our results highlights the depth and richness of metacognitive abilities in human observers.

Many studies report that following feedback, individuals do not update their beliefs enough (a conservatism bias), and react more to good news than to bad news (an asymmetry bias), consistent with the idea of motivated beliefs. In the literature on conservatism and asymmetric updating, however, only one prior study focuses on judgments on absolute performance (Grossman & Owens, 2012), which finds that belief updating is well described by the Bayesian benchmark in that case. Here, we set out to test the replicability of these results and their robustness across several experimental manipulations, varying the uncertainty of participants’ priors, the tasks to perform, the format of beliefs and the elicitation rules used to incentivize these beliefs. We also introduce new measures of ego-relevance of these beliefs, and of the credibility of the feedback received by participants. Overall, we confirm across various experimental conditions that individuals exhibit no conservatism and asymmetry bias when they update their beliefs about their absolute performance. As in Grossman & Owens (2012), most observations are well-described by a Bayesian benchmark in our data. These results suggest a limit to the manifestation of motivated beliefs, and call for more research on the conditions under which biases in belief updating occur.

Perceptual confidence has been an important topic recently. However, one key limitation in current approaches is that most studies have focused on confidence judgments made for single decisions. In three experiments, we investigate how these local confidence judgments relate and contribute to global confidence judgments, by which observers summarize their performance over a series of perceptual decisions. We report two main results. First, we find that participants exhibit more overconfidence in their local than in their global judgments of performance, an observation mirroring the aggregation effect in knowledge-based decisions. We further show that this effect is specific to confidence judgments and does not reflect a calculation bias. Second, we document a novel effect by which participants' global confidence is larger for sets which are more heterogeneous in terms of difficulty, even when actual performance is controlled for. Surprisingly, we find that this effect of variability also occurs at the level of local confidence judgments, in a manner that fully explains the effect at the global level. Overall, our results indicate that global confidence is based on local confidence, although these two processes can be partially dissociated. We discuss possible theoretical accounts to relate and empirical investigations of how observers develop and use a global sense of perceptual confidence.

Although conflicts in bargaining have attracted a lot of attention in the literature, situations in which bargainers have to share the product of their performance have been less commonly investigated empirically. Here, we show that overplacement leads to conflict in these situations: individuals overestimate their contribution to the joint production and consequently make unreasonable claims. We further decompose overplacement into three types of cognitive biases: overestimation of one’s own production (i.e. overconfidence bias), underestimation of others’ production (i.e. superiority bias) and biases in information processing. We show that they all contribute to overplacement. To quantify these biases, we develop a novel experimental setting using a psychophysically controlled production task within a bargaining game, where we elicit participants’ subjective estimation of their performance, both before and after they receive information about the joint production. In addition, we test several interventions to mitigate these biases, and successfully decrease disagreements and overplacement through one of them. Our approach illustrates how combining psychophysical methods and economic analyses could prove helpful to identify the impact of cognitive biases on individuals’ behavior.