Dishonesty in public reports of confidence: Metacognitive monitoring of memory conformity.

Abstract

Although memory is constantly monitored and controlled by the metacognitive system, little is known about how people monitor memory conformity, incorporating information in others' memories into one's memory of a specific event. In this study, we tested participants' memory for a seemingly shared event and asked them to report their confidence in their answers both individually and jointly. We also explored the relationships between specific individual characteristics, memory, and confidence variables. We have two critical findings apart from replicating the well-evidenced memory conformity effect. First, participants were privately more confident in memory decisions when they did not conform to their cowitness than when they conformed. Conversely, they were publicly more confident in decisions when they conformed than when they did not conform. Second, participants were publicly more confident when they conformed to an incorrect than a correct answer, social outsourcing the information when uncertain. These results indicate that the metacognitive system successfully monitors the social influences on memory, tracks the reliability of information presented by another, and refers to it in context-specific ways (i.e., public vs. private).

The Impact of Item Difficulty on Judgment of Confidence—A Cross-Level Moderated Mediation Model

“…Judgment of confidence (JOC) is a typical retrospective metacognitive monitoring, which involves assessing one’s own certainty in responses after completing a task ( Schraw 2008 ). However, during this evaluation, individuals may display tendencies of overconfidence or a lack of confidence, leading to a disparity between perceived and actual performance and affecting the accuracy of individual metacognitive monitoring ( Baranski and Petrusic 1994 ; Çapan et al 2022 ; Jackson et al 2017 ; Putnam et al 2022 ). Various factors, such as experience ( Cichoń et al 2018 ), feedback ( Iida et al 2020 ), and effort ( Lee and Daunizeau 2021 ) can affect individuals’ confidence judgments.…”