Knowing oneself and others: Influence of metacognitive sensitivity on source accuracy judgements

Metacognition is the ability to represent, monitor and control one's cognitive processes. Metacognition has predominantly been studied in terms of its intra-personal implications. Recently, the interpersonal implications of metacognitive judgements, how they are used in social context, and what they pose for human culture have started attracting some attention. Humans rely on a rich source of information communicated by others while forming beliefs and making decisions. In order to reap the benefits of this richness, one should be able to discriminate between reliable and unreliable sources, and information from misinformation. Research showed that rules, cues and theories used for metacognitive self-assessment can transfer to evaluation of other social agents. Accordingly, we examined whether metacognitive sensitivity, ability to discriminate one's correct decisions from incorrect ones, facilitated source assessment and guided better information-seeking decisions concerning social sources. With this study we first asked if metacognition can help us judge the credibility of a message or a source. Then, we assessed whether knowing about source credibility facilitates better confidence calibration, that is adjustment of confidence ratings in the face of feedback. Results showed that metacognitive sensitivity was instrumental, only when judging highly credible sources. Further, metacognitive sensitivity facilitated better confidence calibration in the face of perceptual feedback, but it did not affect the way people used social feedback for confidence calibration.