Séminaire Nancy – Maël Lebreton (PSE)

Détails de l'événement :

“Investigating the effects of incentive motivation on confidence and beliefs”

Abstract: In this talk, I will report on our recent investigations of the effects of incentive motivation on probabilistic judgments. These investigations leverage combinations of perceptual tasks and of belief accuracy incentivization mechanisms, and experimentally manipulate the magnitude and valence (gains or losses) of monetary incentives, so as to orthogonalize their motivational and affective components. In a first set of studies, we investigated how incentive motivation influences confidence judgments, i.e. our subjective beliefs about our own decisions being correct. Our results revealed that while the motivational (i.e. absolute) value of accuracy incentives improves confidence sensitivity, their affective (i.e. net) value concurrently and paradoxically biases confidence reports. In a second set of studies, we investigated whether incentive motivation differently affect proper beliefs, i.e. probability judgments over (external) states, and confidence judgements, i.e. probability judgments over ones’ own actions or statements being correct. On top of the previous experimental framework, we systematically manipulated the agency of decisions over ambiguous states-of-the-world. We replicated the effect of the net incentive value on confidence, which is significantly attenuated in the case of beliefs. Finally, we explored a couple of hypothesis to explain this discrepancy.