Metacognition
Are We More Accurate at Judging Future or Past Decisions?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
People are significantly better at judging the accuracy of their decisions after they have made them compared to beforehand.
How this study connects
Role on claims
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Self-evaluations made after a decision (retrospective judgments) are significantly more accurate than predictions made before or during a task (prospective judgments).
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
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).
Key findings
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.
Methodology
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.
Limitations
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.
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