Vincent de Gardelle
Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne at Paris School of Economics
Confidence : a common currency ?
Some decisions we make are accompanied by a strong feeling of certainty, whereas at other times we know that our decisions are just random guesses. Characterizing the determinants of such confidence judgments is now an important issue in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. But what is confidence good for? I will argue that confidence might help us arbitrate between possible actions, by contributing to the computation of expected values of actions. Therefore, it needs to be represented with an abstract format, comparable across prospects. I will present recent empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis, in the domain of simple perceptual decisions. I will then discuss whether and how confidence can be considered as a common mental currency, at various levels within an individual and across individuals.
