![]() ![]() ![]() “However, too much confidence was associated with lower metacognitive ability,” added Fynn-Mathis Trautwein from the Max Planck Society - a non-profit association in Germany. “The more confident people were about their performance, the higher the activation in brain areas such as the striatum, a brain area often associated with reward processing,” said lead author Pascal Molenberghs from the Monash University in Victoria, Australia. The researchers then measured how good people were in evaluating their own accuracy in a process called metacognition. Subsequently, people indicated how confident they felt about their response being correct. Read: Why people pass the buck when needed to make decisions that affect others People vary widely in their awareness of their metacognitive ability - a higher order thinking which involves active control over the mental processes engaged in learning - and in general are too confident when evaluating their performance, the researchers said.įor the study, the team analysed a social cognition task, where volunteers watched a video of a person narrating a story and following that they answered a question about what the person said in the story. People vary widely in their awareness of their metacognitive ability - a higher order thinking which involves active control over the mental processes engaged in learning - and in general are too confident when evaluating their performance, the researchers said. These findings also suggest the sorts of interventions that are likely to be effective, such as clearer explanations of the costs of payday loans that are less cognitively demanding, as has been shown to be the case in research by Booth Professor Marianne Bertrand and Booth Associate Professor Adair Morse.Overconfident individuals can often be poor in decision making with potentially disastrous consequences, says a study. The findings tell us that decisions that are considered routine by the relatively affluent can take on great urgency for the poor, and that this added urgency can lead to poor decision making in other matters by monopolizing attention and draining cognitive resources. These simple experimental games are obviously a step removed from the actual problems facing people living in poverty, but they capture the essential features of the situation. When players were given the opportunity to “borrow” a shot, by giving up two shots in a later round of the game, players who had fewer in shots made counterproductive borrowing decisions that hurt their overall performance. This added focus improved performance, but it had downsides. They became more focused on the task at hand in order to make the best use of their scarce resources, but that this added focus came at a price, including mental fatigue, costly borrowing decisions, and poor overall performance.įor example, in an Angry Birds-type of game, in which the object was to knock down as many targets as possible, players who could take only three shots per round spent more time aiming each shot than players who had fifteen shots. The researchers then observed how scarcity affected the players’ borrowing behavior, their performance, and the psychological processes at play.Īcross the studies he found that for people who had very few resources, the games took on more urgency. Moreover, in some studies the players had the opportunity to borrow additional resources with interest. In each of the studies some people received ample resources with which to play, while others received very few. Shah, along with colleagues Sendhil Mullainathan of Harvard and Eldar Shafir of Princeton, published five studies in which he studied the effects of scarcity on decision making in various games in which people were paid according to their performance. For example, when they are under the press of urgent expenses like rent and groceries, people may neglect to do routine maintenance on their car and end up with costly (and avoidable) repairs down the road. This focus can have positive effects in the short term, but it comes at the expense of neglecting other, less urgent demands. The basic idea is that when resources are scarce-when people are short on time, or money, or food-each decision about how best to use those resources takes on greater urgency than when resources are abundant. New research published this month in Science by Booth Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science Anuj Shah points to a new answer: living with scarcity changes people’s psychology. In the past, these poor decisions have been attributed either to low income individuals’ personalities or issues in their environment, such as poor education or substandard living conditions. One of the obstacles that keeps the poor from rising out of poverty is the tendency to make costly financial decisions-like buying lottery tickets, taking out high interest loans, and failing to enroll in assistance programs-that only make their situation worse. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |