Boldt, Annika;
Sun, Yishu;
Desender, Kobe;
(2025)
How disconfirmatory evidence shapes confidence in decision-making.
Communications Psychology
, 3
(1)
, Article 150. 10.1038/s44271-025-00325-3.
Preview |
Text
How disconfirmatory evidence shapes confidence in decision-making.pdf - Published Version Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract
When assessing our decisions, the normative strategy involves giving equal weight to each evidence sample when computing confidence. However, recent findings suggest that the brain tends to overweight decision-congruent information when forming confidence judgements (i.e., positive-evidence bias; PEB). Here, we re-analyzed nine datasets (total N = 176) from human participants who judged the average color of eight shapes and gave their confidence. This task precisely allowed us to disentangle the impact of choice-confirming and choice-conflicting evidence on the formation of confidence. Strikingly, participants overly relied on evidence that conflicts with their choice, contrary to the normative model and the PEB. To explain this response-incongruent evidence effect in the computation of confidence, we fitted an extended log-posterior-ratio for confidence model to our data and show that the same robust averaging principle that influences decisions also accounts for these confidence effects: incongruent evidence receives a stronger weight in the computation of confidence because it lies closer to the category boundary around which there is heightened sensitivity. In a preregistered experiment (N = 32), we then empirically demonstrate that an experimentally induced shift in the category boundary affects the computation of confidence in otherwise identical stimuli. We conclude that confidence depends on dis-confirmatory evidence due to downstream consequences from decision-making mechanisms.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | How disconfirmatory evidence shapes confidence in decision-making |
| Location: | England |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1038/s44271-025-00325-3 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1038/s44271-025-00325-3 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
| Keywords: | Social Sciences, Psychology, Multidisciplinary, Psychology, SIGNAL-DETECTION, INFORMATION, TIME, INTEGRATION, CHOICE |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10217096 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
