Abstract
The idea of a common currency underlying our choice behaviour has played an important role in sciences of behaviour, from neurobiology to psychology and economics. However, while it has been mainly investigated in terms of values, with a common scale on which goods would be evaluated and compared, the question of a common scale for subjective probabilities and confidence in particular has received only little empirical investigation so far. The present study extends previous work addressing this question, by showing that confidence can be compared across visual and auditory decisions, with the same precision as for the comparison of two trials within the same task. We discuss the possibility that confidence could serve as a common currency when describing our choices to ourselves and to others.
Highlights
When an individual agent faces a choice between several options, having a common currency to evaluate all options seems useful for comparing them and selecting the best one
The pitch of the first stimulus was roved (3 semi-tones around 440Hz) and the pitch of the second stimulus was determined by staircases, as for the visual task. Observers reported their responses on a keyboard, and during the trial we presented visual symbols on the screen to indicate the mapping between the stimulus categories and the response keys on the keyboard
The average accuracy across participants was equal to 80% or 81% in all cases
Summary
When an individual agent faces a choice between several options, having a common currency to evaluate all options seems useful for comparing them and selecting the best one. One illustration is the euro effect in the domain of international economics: introducing euro as a common currency greatly increased trading within the euro zone (for a meta-analysis see [1]). At the level of individual agents, decision theory has always relied on the notion of utility [2,3] that is, a common scale on which options can be compared, in order to select the option that maximizes utility. Neuroimaging studies showing the involvement of the ventro-medial prefrontal cortex in the valuation of diverse types of goods have provided empirical support to this notion of a common utility scale [6,7]
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