Are you confident enough to act? Individual differences in action control are associated with post-decisional metacognitive bias

Zajkowski, Wojciech, Bielecki, Maksymilian and Marszał-Wiśniewska, Magdalena 2022. Are you confident enough to act? Individual differences in action control are associated with post-decisional metacognitive bias. PLoS ONE 17 (6) , e0268501. 10.1371/journal.pone.0268501

PDF - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (1MB)

Abstract

The art of making good choices and being consistent in executing them is essential for having a successful and fulfilling life. Individual differences in action control are believed to have a crucial impact on how we make choices and whether we put them in action. Action-oriented people are more decisive, flexible and likely to implement their intentions in the face of adversity. In contrast, state-oriented people often struggle to commit to their choices and end up second-guessing themselves. Here, we employ a model-based computational approach to study the underlying cognitive differences between action and state-oriented people in simple binary-choice decision tasks. In Experiment 1 we show that there is little-to-no evidence that the two groups differ in terms of decision-related parameters and strong evidence for differences in metacognitive bias. Action-oriented people exhibit greater confidence in the correctness of their choices as well as slightly elevated judgement sensitivity, although no differences in performance are present. In Experiment 2 we replicate this effect and show that the confidence gap generalizes to value-based decisions, widens as a function of difficulty and is independent of deliberation interval. Furthermore, allowing more time for confidence deliberation indicated that state-oriented people focus more strongly on external features of choice. We propose that a positive confidence bias, coupled with appropriate metacognitive sensitivity, might be crucial for the successful realization of intentions in many real-life situations. More generally, our study provides an example of how modelling latent cognitive processes can bring meaningful insight into the study of individual differences.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	Published
Schools:	Psychology
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Publisher:	Public Library of Science
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	6 June 2022
Date of Acceptance:	3 May 2022
Last Modified:	05 May 2023 14:32
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/150225

Citation Data

Cited 1 time in Scopus. View in Scopus. Powered By Scopus® Data

Actions (repository staff only)

Edit Item