Knowing the crowd within: Metacognitive limits on combining multiple judgments.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Decision Science
• Metacognition

Background:

• Individuals often undervalue combining their own judgments with an advisor's.
• It remains unclear if this bias extends to combining multiple self-generated judgments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how decision-makers utilize multiple judgment opportunities.
• To determine if providing different cues influences the strategy for combining self-generated estimates.

Main Methods:

• Participants provided two percentage estimates for general knowledge questions.
• A final decision phase involved selecting the first, second, or average estimate.
• Cues (general theory labels or item-specific numerical values) were manipulated.

Main Results:

• When given general theory labels, participants averaged estimates but not based on accuracy.
• With item-specific numerical cues, metacognitive accuracy was at chance.
• Combining both general and item-specific cues led to adaptive averaging strategies.

Conclusions:

• The underappreciation of averaging estimates is not solely due to social differences (self vs. advisor).
• Integrating general and item-specific cues significantly enhances metacognitive accuracy in combining self-judgments.