Are you sure about that? Eliciting confidence ratings may influence performance on Raven's progressive matrices

ABSTRACT

Confidence ratings (CR) have often been integrated into reasoning and intelligence tasks as a means for assessing meta-reasoning processes. Although it is often assumed that eliciting these judgements throughout reasoning tasks has no effect on the underlying performance outcomes, this is yet to be established empirically. The current study examines whether eliciting CR from participants during a fluid-reasoning task influences their performance and how this effect is moderated by their initial self-confidence in their own reasoning abilities. In a first experiment, we found that participants performing CR during Raven's Progressive Matrices significantly outperformed a control group who did not provide ratings. Additionally, a second experiment demonstrated that CR only facilitated performance in participants who have a high level of initial self-confidence in their reasoning ability, whereas they were detrimental to participants low in self-confidence.

KEYWORDS:

• Confidence ratings
• meta-reasoning
• Raven's Progressive Matrices
• confidence
• reactivity

Acknowledgments

The views expressed herein are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Australian Research Council. All required ethics approval was obtained through the USYD human ethics review committee. We would like to thank editor Valerie Thompson, reviewer Rakefet Ackerman, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful critiques.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The moderating effects of response time and age on the group difference (CR vs. No-CR) were also examined, but neither was significant (p > .05).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council's Discovery Projects funding scheme [project DP140101147].