Are you sure about that? Eliciting confidence ratings may influence performance on Raven's progressive matrices

Confidence ratings (CR) have often been integrated into reasoning and intelligence tasks as a means for assessing meta-reasoning processes. Although it is often assumed that eliciting these judgements throughout reasoning tasks has no effect on the underlying performance outcomes, this is yet to be...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Thinking & reasoning 2017-04, Vol.23 (2), p.190-206
Main Authors: Double, Kit S., Birney, Damian P.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cognition & reasoning
Confidence
Metacognition
Social psychology
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Summary:Confidence ratings (CR) have often been integrated into reasoning and intelligence tasks as a means for assessing meta-reasoning processes. Although it is often assumed that eliciting these judgements throughout reasoning tasks has no effect on the underlying performance outcomes, this is yet to be established empirically. The current study examines whether eliciting CR from participants during a fluid-reasoning task influences their performance and how this effect is moderated by their initial self-confidence in their own reasoning abilities. In a first experiment, we found that participants performing CR during Raven's Progressive Matrices significantly outperformed a control group who did not provide ratings. Additionally, a second experiment demonstrated that CR only facilitated performance in participants who have a high level of initial self-confidence in their reasoning ability, whereas they were detrimental to participants low in self-confidence.
ISSN:1354-6783
1464-0708
DOI:10.1080/13546783.2017.1289121