Confidence, advice seeking and changes of mind in decision making
Abstract
Humans and other animals rely on social learning strategies to guide their behaviour, especially when the task is difficult and individual learning might be costly or ineffective. Recent models of individual and group decision-making suggest that subjective confidence judgments are a prime candidate in guiding the way people seek and integrate information from social sources. The present study investigates the way people choose and use advice as a function of the confidence in their decisions, using a perceptual decision task to carefully control the quality of participants' decisions and the advice provided. The results show that reported confidence guides the search for new information in accordance with probabilistic normative models. Moreover, large inter-individual differences were found, which strongly correlated with more traditional measures of metacognition. However, the extent to which participants used the advice they received deviated from what would be expected under a Bayesian update of confidence, and instead was characterised by heuristic-like strategies of categorically ignoring vs. accepting advice provided, again with substantial individual differences apparent in the relative dominance of these strategies.
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Higher trust increases individuals' willingness to adjust their judgments in response to external recommendations.
“Similarly, Briggs et al. (2002), Haran and Shalvi (2020), and Pescetelli et al. (2021) found that higher trust increases individuals' willingness to adjust their judgments in response to external recommendations.”
From When Recruiters Meet Algorithms: Advice Taking and Bias in AI‐Assisted Recruitment (2026) · cites this paper as Pescetelli et al. 2021
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When Recruiters Meet Algorithms: Advice Taking and Bias in AI‐Assisted Recruitment
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- Authors
- Pescetelli, N., Hauperich, A.-K., & Yeung, N.
- Affiliations
- University of Oxford (GB)
- Corresponding author
- Pescetelli, Niccolò
- Venue
- Cognition
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2021-10
- Volume
- 215
- Pages
- 104810
- ISSN
- 0010-0277 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W3167899688
- Cited by
- 55
- References
- 13
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 14 · 2024: 15 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 9 · 2021: 2
- FWCI
- 5.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- Locations
- Cognition (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Clarendon Fund
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Developmental and Educational Psychology › Child and Animal Learning Development
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory Processes and Influences
- Keywords
- confidence judgments, advice seeking, social learning, perceptual decision making, metacognition, Bayesian updating, heuristic strategies, individual differences, change of mind, group decision making
- MeSH terms
- Metacognition, Bayes Theorem, Decision Making, Humans, Judgment, Learning
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