Correlates of Confidence in Metamemory Beliefs

Abstract

How we think about our thinking (metacognition) plays a critical role in how we perform day-to-day activities. An important part of our metacognitive lives are the beliefs we have about how our minds work. Among these are metamemory beliefs, which refer to people’s beliefs about how memory works. In the present investigation, I examine a novel potential correlate of individuals’ confidence in such beliefs: the presence of causal reasoning. Across two experiments, participants read descriptions of a cognitive task that featured a manipulation and were asked to provide a prediction about its outcome. I used this prediction as an index of their belief about how the manipulation influences our thinking. Participants were then asked to provide a confidence judgement about that belief, followed by a justification for their prediction, and finally another confidence judgement. Justifications were then coded for the presence of causal reasoning, defined as attributing the predicted memory outcome to an underlying cause beyond the manipulation itself. In Experiment 2, which had sufficient power to detect the small association between causal reasoning on confidence, I found that the presence of causal explanations in participants’ justifications was significantly associated with higher confidence in their prediction. Nonetheless, only about one-quarter of participants provided such causal explanations for their prediction. Additionally, I observed that participants’ confidence increased after they generated a justification for their prediction, indicating that explaining one's beliefs may reinforce, rather than undermine, confidence in them.