Preprints

In recent years, more and more mental health research relies on large-scale online testing. Researchers get hundreds of participants to fill out many mental health questionnaire, and then identify links between their psychiatric tendencies (as revealed by their questionnaire responses) and their behaviour in controlled tasks. Using this method, previous research identified robust links between mental health (compulsivity, depression and anxiety) and decision confidence. In this collaboration with Noam and Ruvi, we show that these correlations are largely driven by factors outside mental health, namely participants’ response biases and their level of attention.

In order to pretend that I don’t know something, I need to mentally simulate what I would do if my knowledge were different than what it is. To do this, I rely on knowledge that I have about my own mind: metacognitive knowledge. Together with Chaz and Ian, we quantified people’s metacognition by measuring their ability to pretend they don’t know something. Specifically, we had them play rounds of Hangman (“reveal the hidden word with as few letter guesses as possible”) and Battleship (“reveal the hidden ships in the grid with as few cell guesses as possible”). We then compared their behaviour in real games against their behaviour in pretend games, in which we told them what the word was, or where the ships were hidden, but asked them to behave as they would if they didn’t have this information. We found a remarkable capacity for self-simulation, but also identified important limitations: pretenders had a tendency to over-act, and were sub-optimal in their taking-in of new information.