Social Influence on Metacognitive Evaluations: The Power of Nonverbal Cues

Abstract

Metacognitive evaluations refer to the processes by which people assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goal. Little is known about whether this process is susceptible to social influence. Here we investigate whether nonverbal social signals spontaneously influence metacognitive evaluations. Participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task, which was followed by a face randomly gazing towards or away from the response chosen by the participant. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation of their response by rating their confidence in their answer. In Experiment 1, the participants were told that the gaze direction was irrelevant to the task purpose and were advised to ignore it. The results revealed an effect of implicit social information on confidence ratings even though the gaze direction was random and therefore unreliable for task purposes. In addition, nonsocial cues (car) did not elicit this effect. In Experiment 2, the participants were led to believe that cue direction (face or car) reflected a previous participant's response to the same question-that is, the social information provided by the cue was made explicit, yet still objectively unreliable for the task. The results showed a similar social influence on confidence ratings, observed with both cues (car and face) but with an increased magnitude relative to Experiment 1. We additionally showed in Experiment 2 that social information impaired metacognitive accuracy. Together our results strongly suggest an involuntary susceptibility of metacognitive evaluations to nonverbal social information, even when it is implicit (Experiment 1) and unreliable (Experiments 1 and 2).

Implicit learning in attractiveness evaluation: The role of conformity and analytical processing.

“…Germar, Schlemmer, Krug, Voss, and Mojzisch (2014) showed that in a simple color discrimination task, other people’s responses presented to participants affected their decisions even when they were informed that these decisions came from a completely different task. Similar results with another perceptual decision-making task were obtained by Eskenazi et al (2016). Using the gaze-cueing paradigm, they found that irrelevant gaze directions presented to participants influenced their confidence judgments on the primary task decisions even though the participants were instructed to ignore these stimuli.…”

Metacognitive hindsight bias

“…Exceptions include Karabenick (1996), who found that questions raised by colearners affected participants' judgment of comprehension. Eskenazi et al (2016) found that presenting a face randomly gazing toward or away from the answer chosen by the participants affected confidence in their answers, whereas a car directed similarly to one of the answer options did not affect confidence (see also Jacquot et al, 2015).…”

Does social context impact metacognition? Evidence from stereotype threat in a visual search task

“…It has also been shown that social cues within the task might affect individuals’ metacognition [5,6], however, whether social context might impact individuals’ metacognitive processing is, to the best of our knowledge, an open question. We argue that candidates to investigate this question are social contexts involving stereotype threat, i.e.…”