Confidence and information seeking in decision making under uncertainty

Thesis

Confidence and information-seeking are aspects of metacognition that help people make better choices under conditions of uncertainty. However, previous research has found that these metacognitive functions can vary greatly between individuals and can become maladaptively decoupled or decalibrated in psychiatric disorders. This thesis explores the relationship between confidence and information-seeking behaviour when making decisions under uncertainty, and individual differences in these measures.

This work begins with the development of two decision tasks that provide parallel measures of confidence and information-seeking in the domains of perceptual judgment and probabilistic reasoning. I then investigate whether psychiatric dimensions of interest might be reliably associated with certain patterns of confidence and information-seeking. I present data showing that, while trait anxiety tended to be associated with a small underconfidence bias across domains, psychiatric dimensions on the whole fail to be consistently predictive of confidence or information-seeking.

I then proceed to explore specific aspects of confidence and information-seeking. While previous literature and preliminary findings had suggested that people might employ strategies other than information-seeking to manage uncertainty during decision-making, I present results suggesting that participants do not typically engage in time-effective strategies like seeking feedback or opting out of decisions, even when they are available as alternatives to information-seeking.

I then look more closely into the relationship between choice and confidence in the decision process. I report a robust increase in confidence at the point of decision, even after accounting for differences in the objective probability of being correct. After investigating possible mechanisms for this effect, I suggest that the act of committing to a decision evokes a boost in confidence, but that this decision-evoked confidence boost fails to have lasting effects on subsequent confidence, information-seeking, or choices.

Overall, my results suggest that confidence and information-seeking generally help us make more adaptive decisions under uncertainty. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of the broader implications of the findings for psychiatric and cognitive research.

Authors: Wei, L

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-ovo4egnmr
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: information seeking; cognitive; individual differences; confidence; metacognition; decision; uncertainty; psychiatric; decision making
• Subjects: Decision making; Metacognition; Cognitive psychology