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

每一天，我们做出的决定都会影响到我们未来的幸福感。但我们真的知道我们是如何做出这些决定的吗？这个项目提出了一种新的方法来探索决策者如何做出决策的知识--心理学家称之为元认知知识。这种方法是专门用来评估决策者在做出必须在不同因素之间进行权衡的主观决策时的元认知知识。这种方法被用来探索一系列关于人们如何思考他们做出的决定的问题。开发和测试这种方法很重要，因为它可以让我们更好地了解人们是如何做出个人决定的，比如买车或买房，还可以做出与政策相关的决定，比如投票给哪位候选人或支持哪项政策。这些知识可以用于设计干预措施和决策环境，帮助人们做出更好的决策。该项目提出了一种在主观的、多属性的选择决策中评估元认知知识的新范式。在这个范式中，参与者被要求完成一项基于选择的联合(CBC)任务，然后自我报告他们认为每个属性对他们决策过程的影响(即权重)。这些自我报告的权重与通过CBC任务的分层贝叶斯估计估计的揭示权重进行比较，一致性越高，表明元认知知识越多。本研究试图验证该范式，实施该范式来分离各种元认知机制(例如，元认知控制、元认知监控)，并使用该范式来探索元认知知识在经典决策现象中可能扮演的角色(例如，框架效应)。这个项目的主要贡献是将元推理(即推理中的元认知)文献-主要集中在客观决策-扩展为主观决策，这些决策非常重要，往往对个人的福祉有重大影响。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.