Source unreliability decreases but does not cancel the impact of social information on metacognitive evaluations

Abstract

Through metacognitive evaluations, individuals assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goals. We have previously shown that non-verbal social cues spontaneously influence these evaluations, even when the cues are unreliable. Here, we explore whether a belief about the reliability of the source can modulate this form of social impact. Participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task that varied in difficulty. The task was followed by a video of a person who was presented as being either competent or incompetent at performing the task. That person provided random feedback to the participant through facial expressions indicating agreement, disagreement or uncertainty. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation by rating their confidence in their answer. Results revealed that participants’ confidence was higher following agreements. Interestingly, this effect was merely reduced but not canceled for the incompetent individual, even though participants were able to perceive the individual’s incompetence. Moreover, perceived agreement induced zygomaticus activity, but only when the feedback was provided for difficult trials by the competent individual. This last result strongly suggests that people implicitly appraise the relevance of social feedback with respect to their current goal. Together, our findings suggest that people always integrate social agreement into their metacognitive evaluations, even when epistemic vigilance mechanisms alert them to the risk of being misinformed.

Two-year-olds’ eye movements reflect confidence in their understanding of words

“…First, we show that toddlers' capacity for core metacognition (i.e., the ability to monitor the reliability of one's own cognitive activity in the absence of external feedback, and to use this information to regulate further cognitive activity: Goupil and Kouider, 2019) is not restricted to the evaluation of simple perceptual decisions, but extends to socially-informed conventional knowledge. Second, our results show for the first time that young children's confidence can be dissociated from their ability to perform a task, and varies depending on the social context, as is the case in adults (Jacquot et al, 2015). Specifically, we found that the relationship between recognition accuracy and persistence disappears when children are presented with an unreliable speaker, despite children's knowledge and performances being the same.…”

Two-Year-Olds’ Eye Movements Reflect Confidence in Their Understanding of Words

“…These alternative interpretations, however, find little support in our results. First, and most importantly, our results show for the first time that young children’s postdecision persistence can be dissociated from their ability to perform a task and varies depending on the social context, as is the case in adults (Jacquot et al, 2015). Such a dissociation would not be expected if accuracy and persistence were driven by a single mechanism.…”

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).…”