Comparing self- and hetero-metacognition in the absence of verbal communication

ABSTRACT

The ability to infer how confident other people are in their decisions is crucial for regulating social interactions. It is unclear whether one can read others’ confidence in absence of verbal communication and whether one can infer it as accurately as for one’s own confidence. To address these questions, we used an auditory task in which participants had to guess the confidence of someone else performing the task or to judge their own confidence in different conditions (i.e., while performing the task themselves or while watching themselves performing the task on a pre-recorded video). Results show that participants are able to guess the confidence of other people as accurately as when judging their own. Crucially, we show that hetero-metacognition is a flexible mechanism relying on different cues according to the context. Our results support the idea that metacognition leverages the same inference mechanisms as involved in theory of mind.