Distorted learning from local metacognition supports transdiagnostic underconfidence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Individuals experiencing symptoms of anxiety and depression have been shown to exhibit persistent underconfidence. The origin of such metacognitive biases presents a puzzle, given that individuals should be able to learn appropriate levels of confidence from observing their own performance. In two large general population samples (N = 230 and N = 278), we measure both 'local' confidence in individual task instances and 'global' confidence as longer-run self-performance estimates while manipulating external feedback. Global confidence is sensitive to both local confidence and feedback valence-more frequent positive (negative) feedback increases (respectively decreases) global confidence, with asymmetries in feedback also leading to shifts in affective self-beliefs. Notably, however, global confidence exhibits reduced sensitivity to instances of higher local confidence in individuals with greater subclinical anxious-depression symptomatology, despite sensitivity to feedback valence remaining intact. Our finding of blunted sensitivity to increases in local confidence offers a mechanistic basis for how persistent underconfidence is maintained in the face of intact performance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".