Variability in prior expectations explains biases in confidence reports

Abstract

Confidence in a decision is defined statistically as the probability of that decision being correct. Humans, however, display systematic confidence biases, as has been exposed in various experiments. Here, we show that these biases vanish when taking into account participants' prior expectations, which we measure independently of the confidence report. We use a wagering experiment to show that modeling subjects' choices allows for classifying individuals according to their prior biases, which fully explain from first principles the differences in their later confidence reports. Our parameter-free confidence model predicts two counterintuitive patterns for individuals with different prior beliefs: pessimists should report higher confidence than optimists, and, for the same task difficulty, the confidence of pessimists should increase with the generosity of the task. These findings show how systematic confidence biases can be simply understood as differences in prior expectations.