DDRIG in DRMS: Knowing Less Than We Can Tell: Assessing Metacognitive Knowledge in Subjective, Multi-Attribute Choice

Every day we make decisions that can impact our happiness well into the future. But do we really know how we make these decisions? This project proposes a new method for exploring decision makers’ knowledge of how they make decisions – which psychologists refer to as metacognitive knowledge. This method is specifically designed to assess decision makers’ metacognitive knowledge when they are making subjective decisions in which they must make tradeoffs between different factors. The method is used to explore a range of questions about how people think about the decisions that they make. Developing and testing this method is important because it allows us to better understand how people make not only personal decisions, such as buying a car or house, but also policy-relevant decisions, such as which candidate to vote for or which policy to endorse. This knowledge can be useful in designing interventions and decision environments that help people make better decisions. The project presents a novel paradigm for assessing metacognitive knowledge in subjective, multi-attribute choice decisions. In this paradigm, participants are asked to complete a Choice-Based Conjoint (CBC) task, then self-report the influence (i.e., weight) they believe each attribute had on their decision-making process. These self-reported weights are compared to revealed weights estimated via Hierarchical Bayes Estimation from the CBC task, with higher correspondence indicating greater metacognitive knowledge. The proposed studies seek to validate the paradigm, implement the paradigm to isolate various metacognitive mechanisms (e.g., metacognitive control, metacognitive monitoring), and use the paradigm to explore the role that metacognitive knowledge may play in classic decision phenomena (e.g., framing effects). The primary contribution of this project is to expand the meta-reasoning (i.e., metacognition in reasoning) literature – which has primarily focused on objective decisions – into subjective decisions, which are highly important and often have significant impacts on individuals’ well-being. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.