Confidence reflects a noisy decision reliability estimate
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Abstract
Decisions vary in difficulty. Humans know this and typically report more confidence in easy than in difficult decisions. However, confidence reports do not perfectly track decision accuracy, but also reflect response biases and difficulty misjudgements. To isolate the quality of confidence reports, we developed a model of the decision-making process underlying choice-confidence data. In this model, confidence reflects a subject's estimate of the reliability of their decision. The quality of this estimate is limited by the subject's uncertainty about the uncertainty of the variable that informs their decision ('meta-uncertainty'). This model provides an accurate account of choice-confidence data across a broad range of perceptual and cognitive tasks, investigated in six previous studies. We find meta-uncertainty varies across subjects, is stable over time, generalizes across some domains and can be manipulated experimentally. The model offers a parsimonious explanation for the computational processes that underlie and constrain the sense of confidence.
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- Authors
- Boundy-Singer, Z. M., Ziemba, C. M., & Goris, R. L. T.
- Affiliations
- The University of Texas at Austin (US)
- Corresponding author
- Goris, Robbe L. T.
- Venue
- Nature Human Behaviour
- Published
- 2022-11-07
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 142-154
- ISSN
- 2397-3374 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4308458860
- Cited by
- 71
- References
- 19
- Citations by year
- 2026: 10 · 2025: 21 · 2024: 25 · 2023: 13 · 2022: 2
- FWCI
- 10.35
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature Human Behaviour (publishedVersion)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Eye Institute (T32 EY021462, K99 EY032102, EY032999)
- Whitehall Foundation
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Visual perception and processing mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Neural and Behavioral Psychology Studies
- Keywords
- decision confidence, decision reliability, response bias, decision difficulty, confidence judgments, computational models of decision making, perceptual decision making, cognitive decision-making
- MeSH terms
- Decision Making, Humans, Reproducibility of Results, Uncertainty
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