Source unreliability decreases but does not cancel the impact of social information on metacognitive evaluations.

Benoît Montalan,Edith Sales-Wuillemin,Laurence Conty,Amélie Jacquot,Terry Eskenazi,Julie Grèzes,Joëlle Proust

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01385

Abstract

Through metacognitive evaluations, individuals assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goals. We have previously shown that non-verbal social cues spontaneously influence these evaluations, even when the cues are unreliable. Here, we explore whether a belief about the reliability of the source can modulate this form of social impact. Participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task that varied in difficulty. The task was followed by a video of a person who was presented as being either competent or incompetent at performing the task. That person provided random feedback to the participant through facial expressions indicating agreement, disagreement or uncertainty. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation by rating their confidence in their answer. Results revealed that participants’ confidence was higher following agreements. Interestingly, this effect was merely reduced but not canceled for the incompetent individual, even though participants were able to perceive the individual’s incompetence. Moreover, perceived agreement induced zygomaticus activity, but only when the feedback was provided for difficult trials by the competent individual. This last result strongly suggests that people implicitly appraise the relevance of social feedback with respect to their current goal. Together, our findings suggest that people always integrate social agreement into their metacognitive evaluations, even when epistemic vigilance mechanisms alert them to the risk of being misinformed.

Highlights

Other than communicating important information about others’ feelings and attitudes (George and Conty, 2008), non-verbal social cues such as gaze or facial expression provide circumstantial information that may guide people’s decisions
We observed an interaction between Competence and Expression [F(2,48) = 10.49, ε = 0.91; pcorr < 0.0001], indicating that agreement expressed by the competent previous participants (PP) has a greater impact on confidence than agreement expressed by the incompetent PP [t(24) = 3.78; p < 0.001 – Figure 2]
Agreement expressed by the competent PP induced elevated zygomaticus activity when compared to Disagreement expressed by that same PP

Summary

Introduction

Other than communicating important information about others’ feelings and attitudes (George and Conty, 2008), non-verbal social cues such as gaze or facial expression provide circumstantial information that may guide people’s decisions. Non-verbal social cues can spontaneously affect metacognitive evaluations of past decisions (Eskenazi et al, in revision). Social influence on metacognitive evaluations in cognitive tasks (Proust, 2010). Metacognitive evaluations are usually measured by a second-order decision, which may occur in the form of a subjective confidence judgment in past performance on a first-order task (i.e., retrospective evaluations; Fleming et al, 2010; Kepecs and Mainen, 2012). Several works have aimed to identify the informational cues used by people to elaborate their metacognitive evaluations (Alter and Oppenheimer, 2009; Bahrami et al, 2010; Koriat and Ackerman, 2010). In previous work from our lab, we found that people spontaneously adjust their metacognitive retrospective evaluations based on the nonverbal feedback given by another individual (Eskenazi et al, in revision). We investigated whether this form of social influence varies as a function of the reliability of the social source providing the feedback

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion