Are We More Accurate at Judging Future or Past Decisions?
People are significantly better at judging the accuracy of their decisions after they have made them compared to beforehand.
Source
But I Was So Sure! Metacognitive Judgments Are Less Accurate Given Prospectively than Retrospectively
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Random assignment to prospective vs retrospective confidence on an anagram/lexical decision task
- N
- N=97 · 65 women, ages 18–30
- Population
- Young adult volunteers with normal or corrected vision
- Outcome
- Metacognitive accuracy of confidence judgments made before versus after the decision
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Are We More Accurate at Judging Future or Past Decisions?
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Ninety-seven participants
Ninety-seven volunteers, 65 women, aged 18–30 ( M = 21.73, SD = 2.1) took part in the experiment in return for a small payment.
three conditions
Participants were tested in small groups in a computer laboratory and randomly assigned to one of three conditions: they firstly decided if a target word presented on a screen was an anagram solution and then judged their confidence (target-decision-metacognitive judgment, tDM), they prospectively rated the confidence of their decision after seeing a target (tMD), or they prospectively rated the confidence of their decision before seeing a target (MtD).
What they did
Ninety-seven young adults were split into three groups to solve anagrams and evaluate their confidence. In the retrospective condition, participants saw a potential solution, decided if it was correct, and then rated their confidence. In both prospective conditions, participants rated their confidence either before seeing the potential solution or after seeing it but before making their final decision.
What they found
Although confidence levels predicted accuracy across all conditions, metacognitive accuracy was significantly higher for retrospective judgments than for prospective ones. Additionally, participants who rated their confidence before seeing the target word reported lower confidence overall and showed lower decision accuracy, which dropped to 66% compared to 70% in the retrospective condition.
The limits
What it doesn't show
The study cannot pinpoint exactly which post-decisional cues, such as physical action or cognitive feedback, boost retrospective accuracy. It also excludes data from participants whose accuracy fell below 60%, meaning these findings might not apply to individuals who struggle with the task. Finally, because it used a specific anagram-solving task, the results may not generalize to other types of cognitive or perceptual decisions.
Key terms
- Metacognition
- Cognition about cognition, referring to how we monitor and evaluate our own mental processes.
- Prospective judgment
- A metacognitive evaluation made before a final decision, predicting how accurate one will be.
- Retrospective judgment
- A metacognitive evaluation made after a decision is made, assessing how accurate it was.
- Metacognitive accuracy
- The strength of the relationship between a person's subjective confidence and their actual performance.
- Direct translation hypothesis
- The theory proposing that both our primary decision and our confidence in that decision are based on the same cognitive information.
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What is the "direct translation hypothesis" in the literature on decision confidence?
Common questions
Why is retrospective confidence more accurate than prospective confidence?
After a decision is made, the brain can use extra cues like how fast the response was, physical motor feedback, or continued unconscious processing of evidence to make a more accurate confidence rating.
Does seeing the target word before rating confidence change how people behave?
Yes, seeing the target word first makes people more confident. When participants had to judge their future accuracy before seeing the target, they rated their confidence significantly lower.
Why did the researchers exclude some participants from the final analysis?
They excluded participants whose accuracy was below 60% to ensure they were only analyzing data from people who were genuinely attempting to solve the anagrams rather than guessing randomly.
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