New preprint! Do men and women differ in their metacognitive abilities? In a new preprint, we detail robust differences in global and local metacognition which span multiple cognitive domains. Read all about our findings in this thread! #psychology #neuroskyence osf.io/preprints/ps... - ThreadSky

micahgallen.com • 393 days ago

New preprint! Do men and women differ in their metacognitive abilities? In a new preprint, we detail robust differences in global and local metacognition which span multiple cognitive domains. Read all about our findings in this thread! #psychology #neuroskyence
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/2gwky

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paulallen.ca•385 days ago

Please consider running your study on students in their final year of secondary education. I'd be interested in relations between GPA, decision to pursue post-secondary education, and the metacognitive gender bias that you document here.

micahgallen.com•385 days ago

We’d love to do that! It would be really interesting to do this and look at educational outcomes coupled with confidence feedback.

sampendu.bsky.social•391 days ago

Interesting work! Since nobody has asked this yet: You are referring to gender-differences so I am wondering if you have any information on non-binary or non-cis people in this?

micahgallen.com•391 days ago

Hey Sam, thanks! Only one participant identified as non-binary, so not enough for any informative analyses. An important limitation!

micahgallen.com•393 days ago

Decades of psychology research indicates that men often express high levels of confidence relative to female colleagues. This "confidence gap" can undermine equity and lead to a "double bind" in which women are simultaneously punished for expressing too much or too little confidence.

micahgallen.com•393 days ago

Despite this, it is largely unknown whether these differences reflect an overall level of confidence (metacognitive "bias") or a difference in the calibration of confidence to accuracy or ability (metacognitive "sensitivity").

micahgallen.com•393 days ago

To address this, we measured metacognition across 4 domains (vision, recognition memory, and episodic memory for socioeconomic and food trivia ), in 317 participants (172 Female). We also measured "global" self beliefs before and after.

micahgallen.com•393 days ago

As a first positive control, we checked whether our staircasing procedure successfully equated performance between the groups. Indeed, men and women showed largely equivalent accuracy and reaction time across the task battery.

micahgallen.com•393 days ago

We next examined self-beliefs, which index explicit beliefs about ability in each domain and metacognitive knowledge. We found a striking gender difference: women were less confident overall, estimating around 10% lower accuracy, and also updated their beliefs more sharply than men.

micahgallen.com•393 days ago

We then looked at "local" confidence - i.e. metacognitive bias across trials on each task. We found that women were again less confident in general, and also showed a greater sensitivity to errors than did men. At both global and local levels, these differences were greatest for the GDP condition.

srhastraea.bsky.social•391 days ago

Wow - great stuff Micah. That’s going straight into my upcoming Memory and Cognition lecture.

micahgallen.com•391 days ago

Glad to hear that, thanks!

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