Browsing by Subject "Metacognition"
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Item Open Access How Should I Think About It?: Perceived Suitability and the Resolution of Simultaneous Conflicting Preferences(2007-08-08) Bond, SamuelConsumers often face conflict between what "makes sense" and what "feels right" - between logical analysis and intuition. This dissertation focuses on the means by which such conflict is resolved. Extending dual-process models of judgment, we suggest that consumers often select a processing output based on their assessment regarding the appropriateness of experiential (system-1) and analytical (system-2) responses. Specifically, we propose distinct mechanisms that affect the weighting of experiential versus analytical outputs by influencing the perceived suitability of each processing mode, and we test these mechanisms in a series of experimental studies. In order to demonstrate the broad applicability of our framework, these studies investigate numerous domains in which the 'head' and 'gut' produce opposing responses, employ diverse manipulations of perceived suitability, and utilize multiple judgment and evaluation measures.The dissertation is organized in three chapters. Chapter One provides an overview of dual-systems theories and introduces the notion of simultaneous conflicting preferences. In addition, the chapter describes our conceptualization of perceived suitability as a metacognitive construct and lays out a model by which this construct influences the resolution of conflicting preferences. Chapter Two presents six empirical studies spanning a number of paradigms relevant to consumer behavior and social cognition. As an initial demonstration, Studies 1-2 utilized a semantic priming task to manipulate representations of experiential and analytical processing, and then tested the effects of this manipulation in a game of chance pitting a logically superior option against one that was perceptually appealing. Studies 3-6 expanded our model to situations involving conflict between implicit and explicit brand attitudes. Three of these studies (3, 5, and 6) tested the proposition that prior-formed, 'implicit' attitudes will affect even overt preferences to the extent that experiential processing is deemed suitable to the evaluation task. The other (Study 4) identified various decision characteristics that may affect the perceived suitability of each processing mode in real-world decisions. Chapter Three concludes the dissertation by reviewing the evidence for our conceptual model and discussing both theoretical and practical contributions of the question "How should I think about it?" in situations pitting instincts against reason.Item Open Access Searching for Information in the Digital Age: Implications for Metacognition and Learning(2022) Eliseev, Emmaline DrewIn the current digital age, people are increasingly relying on the internet as their primary source for looking up and learning new information. In 9 experiments, this dissertation seeks to understand how searching for information affects people’s metacognitive judgments and learning outcomes. First, we investigate how searching the internet for explanations impacts people’s confidence in their explanatory ability and the accuracy of their subsequent explanations. Second, we examine how looking up translations online affects people’s judgments of learning and their performance on a learning test. Third, we test how solving word searches influences people’s estimates of their knowledge of definitions. As people use cues to infer what they know, the effect of searching on metacognitive judgments depends on the cues that are available during searching. Specifically, searching inflates confidence in one’s knowledge when features in the search environment increase feelings of fluency (Ch. 2), but reduces confidence in one’s knowledge when searching produces feelings of disfluency (Ch. 3 & 4). Although searching involves active engagement, our results suggest that searching does not benefit learning (Ch. 2) and can even impair learning when it disrupts the encoding of to-be-learned information (Ch. 3). Overall, our findings suggest that it is not the act of searching itself but rather the cues that are available during searching that influence how people assess their own knowledge and how well they learn new information.
Item Open Access Understanding the Hypercorrection Effect: Why High-Confidence Errors are More Likely to be Corrected(2010) Fazio, Lisa K.The hypercorrection effect refers to the finding that high-confidence errors are more likely to be corrected after feedback than are low-confidence errors (Butterfield & Metcalfe, 2001). In 5 experiments I examine the hypercorrection effect, offer possible explanations for why the effect occurs, and examine the durability of the effect. In Experiment 1, I replicate the hypercorrection effect and show that delaying the feedback does not reduce the effect. In a secondary item analysis I also show that the effect is not caused by "tricky" questions. In Experiments 2 and 3, I show that subjects are more likely to remember the source of the feedback after both high-confidence errors and low-confidence correct responses. This suggests that it is the discrepancy between the subject's expectation and the actual feedback that causes the hypercorrection effect. In Experiment 4 I show that the hypercorrection effect also occurs for episodic false memories showing the diversity of the effect. Finally, in Experiment 5 I examine the durability of the effect. Initial high-confidence errors that are corrected after feedback remain corrected one week later.