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Abstract:
Confidence about one’s choices is increasingly recognized as an essential component of decision making. The most common definition of confidence is in terms of the probability that a choice was correct; however, the objective definition of correctness is not always clear. For example, in a two-armed bandit problem, the same greedy, exploitative, choice could be correct in the context of optimizing immediate reward, but incorrect (compared with exploration) in the context of optimizing total long-run reward. We asked a hundred online participants to play a two-arm bandit task known as the horizon task. On each trial, participants were required to make four forced choices that revealed either equal or unequal information about the worth of each bandit. Afterwards, participants were allowed to make either one or six free choices. Following the first free choice, but before revealing the outcome, we asked people to rate their confidence in their choice as leading to greater immediate rewards, or greater total rewards. Consistent with previous studies, we found that as the decision horizon increased, people more often chose a more uncertain arm. Moreover, when people chose an uncertain arm that also had a lower average reward, they were more confident that the choice would lead to a higher total reward than to a higher immediate reward. This suggests that metacognitive judgments are sensitive to the context in which choice correctness should be evaluated. Furthermore, we found that the extent to which confidence judgments diverged was uncorrelated with measures of exploratory behaviour, suggesting dissociable mechanisms of choice and confidence in value-based decision making.
