Department of Psychology, SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Warsaw, Poland.
Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre, School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2022 Jun 1;17(6):e0268501. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0268501. eCollection 2022.
The art of making good choices and being consistent in executing them is essential for having a successful and fulfilling life. Individual differences in action control are believed to have a crucial impact on how we make choices and whether we put them in action. Action-oriented people are more decisive, flexible and likely to implement their intentions in the face of adversity. In contrast, state-oriented people often struggle to commit to their choices and end up second-guessing themselves. Here, we employ a model-based computational approach to study the underlying cognitive differences between action and state-oriented people in simple binary-choice decision tasks. In Experiment 1 we show that there is little-to-no evidence that the two groups differ in terms of decision-related parameters and strong evidence for differences in metacognitive bias. Action-oriented people exhibit greater confidence in the correctness of their choices as well as slightly elevated judgement sensitivity, although no differences in performance are present. In Experiment 2 we replicate this effect and show that the confidence gap generalizes to value-based decisions, widens as a function of difficulty and is independent of deliberation interval. Furthermore, allowing more time for confidence deliberation indicated that state-oriented people focus more strongly on external features of choice. We propose that a positive confidence bias, coupled with appropriate metacognitive sensitivity, might be crucial for the successful realization of intentions in many real-life situations. More generally, our study provides an example of how modelling latent cognitive processes can bring meaningful insight into the study of individual differences.
做出正确选择并始终如一地执行这些选择的艺术对于拥有成功和充实的生活至关重要。人们相信，行动控制方面的个体差异对我们做出选择的方式以及我们是否将其付诸行动有至关重要的影响。以行动为导向的人更果断、灵活，并且在面对逆境时更有可能实施自己的意图。相比之下，以状态为导向的人往往难以做出选择，最终会对自己的选择产生怀疑。在这里，我们采用基于模型的计算方法来研究简单二元选择决策任务中以行动为导向的人和以状态为导向的人之间潜在的认知差异。在实验 1 中，我们表明，这两组人在决策相关参数方面几乎没有差异，而在元认知偏差方面则有明显差异。以行动为导向的人对自己选择的正确性更有信心，并且判断敏感性略高，尽管在表现上没有差异。在实验 2 中，我们复制了这种效应，并表明这种信心差距适用于基于价值的决策，随着难度的增加而扩大，并且独立于思考间隔。此外，允许更多时间用于信心思考表明，以状态为导向的人更关注选择的外部特征。我们提出，积极的信心偏差加上适当的元认知敏感性，可能对于在许多现实生活情况下成功实现意图至关重要。更广泛地说，我们的研究提供了一个范例，说明了如何通过建模潜在的认知过程为研究个体差异提供有意义的见解。
