Feeling happy and (over)confident: the role of positive affect in metacognitive processes

ABSTRACT

The relationship between affect and metacognitive processes has been largely overlooked in both the affect and the metacognition literatures. While at the core of many affect-cognition theories is the notion that positive affective states lead people to be more confident, few studies systematically investigated how positive affect influences confidence and strategic behaviour. In two experiments, when participants were free to control answer interval to general knowledge questions (e.g. question: “in what year”, answer: “it was between 1970 and 1985”), participants induced with positive affect outperformed participants in a neutral affect condition. However, in Experiment 1 positive affect participants showed larger overconfidence than neutral affect participants. In Experiment 2, enhanced salience of social cues eliminated this overconfidence disadvantage of positive affect relative to neutral affect participants, without compromising their enhanced performance. Notably, in both experiments, positive affect led to compromised social norms regarding the answers’ informativeness. Implications for both affect and metacognition are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Positive affect
• metacognition
• overconfidence
• control over grain size
• strategic regulation of memory accuracy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Notably, while many studies investigated the effects of positive affect on cognitive task performance, to the best of our knowledge, efficiency was not examined in this context.

2. In both experiments we targeted a sample size of 24–30 participants per condition on the basis of previous research that used the same cognitive task (Ackerman & Goldsmith, 2008).

3. We examined the moderating role of answer’s correctness (i.e. right/wrong) on the relationship between affect and confidence using a two-way ANOVA but found no significant interaction (F < 1).

4. Similar to Experiment 1, there was no moderating effect of answer’s correctness on the relationship between affect and confidence (F < 1).