Confidence and the mathematician in our brain
Up until recently it was believed that a complicated analysing process is responsible for our confidence in our decisions. Balázs Hangya, a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Medicine of MTA and his colleagues suggest that simple mathematical principles are behind this complicated feeling.
Psychologists have attempted to create several theories to account for our feelings of confidence. The latest conclusions made by Hungarian scientists suggest, however, that although nerve-racking uncertainty or even excessive overconfidence are on the face of it human feelings they are both governed by strict principles based on mathematical statistics.
In an experiment conducted by researcher Balázs Hangya (MTA Institute of Experimental Medicine) and his colleagues, volunteers were asked to listen to repetitive clicking sounds through headphones. The clicks had different frequencies in the two headphones and the frequency difference was set according to pre-determined probabilities. The subjects had to decide whether the two frequencies were different and on a scale from 1 to 5, mark how confident they were in their decision. Human confidence judgments were compared to the mathematical confidence values calculated from the known distribution of clicks. It seems, our brain produces the same results determined by the rules of mathematical statistics. This means, in case of a wrong decision, our confidence diminishes as the task is simplified whereas if it is impossible to make a decision, our confidence is not low, as we would expect, but average.
With their next experiment Balázs Hangya and his research group went a step further. The subjects were asked to guess which of two selected countries had a larger population and confidence judgments were again required. The leaders of the experiment had no information about the test subjects’ previous knowledge about the countries. Therefore, no custom model could be set up for the mental reaction of the patients. Surprisingly, the confidence values followed the pattern determined by mathematical statistics, contradicting intuitive behavioural patterns several times.
The significance of this astonishing result is that up to this point we only had metacognitive models to explain how the feeling of confidence materialises. The theory was that following a given decision making process, our brain examines certain other factors to calculate how confident the decision had been – this process is called metacognition. The results obtained by Balázs Hangya and his fellow researchers, however, suggest that confidence originates from the decision making process itself.
For further information regarding the research, please click here.