Confidence in real-world decision making

Prior research on confidence in perceptual decision making has almost exclusively used simple, static stimuli. While this work has led to many insights, it remains unclear how complex, real-world factors affect confidence judgments. To address this question, we developed a new task where participants watched short video clips and answered questions about their content by typing their answers and providing confidence on a 0-100 scale. We manipulated five variables related to the video clips – affective states induced by the clips (valence and arousal), prior information about the clips (contextual information coming from prior clips from the same movie and whether those clips were in correct or reverse chronological order), and heuristic cues about task difficulty (scene complexity, quantified as the number of people shown). We found that arousal had a U-shaped effect on accuracy but an inverted-U-shaped effect on confidence. In addition, scene complexity, events chronology, and the number of prior clips from the same movie affected confidence, but not accuracy. A second experiment, in which participants chose among a fixed set of options, replicated all these effects except for the effect of events chronology on confidence. These findings demonstrate that a range of factors— including affect, priors, and heuristic information— contribute selectively to confidence under natural viewing conditions. More broadly, these results highlight major differences in how decisions and confidence incorporate information and begin to reveal the possible sources of metacognitive inefficiency.