How Feedback Affects Our Judgment of Complex Decisions

Ever wondered how we judge our own performance when faced with tough decisions? It turns out, our ability to think about our thinking, called metacognition, plays a big role. This is especially true when decisions are complex and need lots of mental energy, like in economic choices. But how do we estimate how well we're doing in such situations? Researchers looked at how feedback and task difficulty influence our self-performance estimates (SPEs). They compared this in both complex economic decisions and simpler perceptual decisions. Surprisingly, how well we actually perform depends only on how hard the task is, not on whether we get feedback or not.

In complex economic decisions, people felt they did worse without feedback, but only when the task was easy. When things got tough, feedback didn't matter as much. Interestingly, in simple perceptual decisions, people felt they did worse without feedback, no matter how hard the task was. This suggests that when faced with complex economic choices, we use different metacognitive strategies for easy and hard tasks. Feedback seems to matter more when the going is easy, but not so much when the decision is tough.

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