Metacognitive Experiences and the Intricacies of Setting People Straight: Implications for Debiasing and Public Information Campaigns

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Publisher Summary

This chapter describes the role of metacognitive experiences in judgment and decision making, and explores their implications for debiasing strategies and public information campaigns. Human reasoning is accompanied by a variety of metacognitive experiences, which provide experiential information that people systematically use in forming a judgment. These experiences qualify the implications of accessible declarative information, with the result that people's judgments can only be predicted by taking the interplay of declarative and experiential information into account. The chapter emphasizes on two of these experiences—namely, the ease or difficulty with which information can be brought to mind and thoughts can be generated, and the fluency with which new information can be processed. Accessibility experiences refer to the ease or difficulty with which information can be recalled and thoughts can be generated. According to most models of judgment, an object should be evaluated more favorably when many positive attributes are brought to mind, should consider an event more likely when many reasons are generated for its occurrence, and so on.

Introduction

Decades of psychological research documented that human judgment often falls short of normative ideals. Social and cognitive psychologists discovered an ever increasing number of systematic biases and illustrated their pervasive role in judgment and decision making (for reviews see Gilovich 2002, Kahneman 1982, Kerr 2004, Nisbett 1980, Pohl 2005). Similarly, researchers in applied fields, like health and consumer behavior, identified numerous erroneous beliefs that impair good decisions and prevent people from doing what would be in their best interest (Christensen 1999, Webley 2001). In both cases, the remedy seems obvious: If people only thought enough about the issues at hand, considered all the relevant information and employed proper reasoning strategies, their decision making would surely improve. This assumption is at the heart of numerous strategies that attempt to debias human judgment (for a review see Larrick, 2004); it is likewise central to public information campaigns designed to dispel erroneous beliefs and to replace them with more accurate information (for a review see Rice & Atkin, 2001).

Unfortunately, these attempts to improve decision making often fail to achieve their goals, even under conditions assumed to foster rational judgment. Models of rational choice assume that people will expend more time and effort on getting it right when the stakes are high; hence, providing proper incentives should improve judgment. Empirically, it rarely does and Camerer and Hogarth (1999, p. 33) concluded after an extensive review that “there is no replicated study in which a theory of rational choice was rejected at low stakes in favor of a well‐specified behavioral alternative, and accepted at high stakes.” Similarly, increasing people's accountability for their decisions improves performance in some cases, but impedes it in others (for a review see Lerner & Tetlock, 1999). One piece of this puzzle is that increased effort will only improve performance when people already possess strategies that are appropriate for the task at hand; in the absence of such strategies, they will just do the wrong thing with more gusto (see Shafir & LeBoeuf, 2002). But even when no particularly sophisticated strategy is required, trying harder does not necessarily result in any improvement—in fact, it may often backfire. This is the case for one of the most widely recommended debiasing strategies: encouraging people to “consider the opposite,” or to counterargue their initial response, by asking themselves, “What are some reasons that my initial judgment might be wrong?” (Larrick, 2004, p. 323). Ironically, the more people try to consider the opposite, the more they often convince themselves that their initial judgment was right on target. The strategy of consider the opposite produces this unintended effect because it ignores the second piece of the puzzle: the metacognitive experiences that accompany the reasoning process.

Similar surprises arise in the domain of public information campaigns. Presumably, erroneous beliefs can be dispelled by confronting them with contradictory evidence. Yet attempts to do so often increase later acceptance of the erroneous beliefs, as known since Allport and Lepkin's pioneering research (1945) into rumor transmission. Again, the unintended effect arises because the educational strategy focuses solely on information content and ignores the metacognitive experiences that are part and parcel of the reasoning process.

This chapter draws attention to the role of metacognitive experiences in judgment and decision making and explores their implications for debiasing strategies and public information campaigns. It is organized as follows. The first section introduces key metacognitive experiences and summarizes their principles of operation. The second section addresses a core assumption of most debiasing techniques: If people only thought enough about the right inputs, they would arrive at a less biased judgment. We identify the conditions under which this assumption holds as well as the conditions under which this strategy backfires. The third section addresses public information campaigns and illuminates why attempts to discredit erroneous beliefs often achieve the opposite. Throughout, we identify open issues for future research and the chapter concludes with a discussion of theoretical and applied implications.

Section snippets

Metacognitive Experiences

Most theories of judgment and decision making (for reviews see Koehler 2004, Lopes 1994, Plous 1993, Wyer 1989 focus on the role of declarative information, that is on what people think about, and on the inference rules they apply to accessible thought content. Not surprisingly, theories of debiasing share this focus (for reviews see Arkes 1991, Fischhoff 1982, Larrick 2004, Wilson 1994). However, human reasoning is accompanied by a variety of metacognitive experiences, which provide

Accessibility Experiences And The Emergence And Attenuation Of Bias

According to content‐focused models of judgment, many biases arise because people focus narrowly on focal features of the issue and fail to consider a wider range of information. For example, people are overconfident about future success because they focus on behaviors that will lead to success and fail to consider variables that may impede success (Koriat, Lichtenstein, & Fischhoff, 1980); once they learn about the outcome of an event, people assume that they knew all along that this would

Fluency, Familiarity, and Truth: Implications for Public Information Campaigns

So far, we considered metacognitive experiences that arise when people elaborate on an issue. We now turn to a metacognitive experience that accompanies exposure to new information, namely the fluency with which the information can be processed. As discussed in Section II, people correctly assume that familiar information is easier to process than novel information. Applying this naive theory of mental processes, they infer from experienced processing fluency that the information is

Implications And Future Directions

Guided by the information processing paradigm and its computer metaphor (Lachman, Lachman, & Butterfield, 1979), psychologists emphasized the “cold” cognitive processes of information encoding, storage, and retrieval. In social psychology, this emphasis was soon complemented by an exploration of processes that do not easily fit the computer metaphor, including the use of experiential information. While the initial work addressed the role of moods and emotions, later work extended the analysis

Acknowledgments

We thank Daniel Kahneman, Johannes Keller, Ruth Mayo, and Daphna Oyserman for critical discussions of an earlier draft of this chapter.

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