title: Source unreliability decreases but does not cancel the impact of social information on metacognitive evaluations.
abstract: Through metacognitive evaluations, individuals assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goals. We have previously shown that non-verbal social cues spontaneously influence these evaluations, even when the cues are unreliable. Here, we explore whether a belief about the reliability of the source can modulate this form of social impact. Participants performed a two-alternative forced choice task that varied in difficulty. The task was followed by a video of a person who was presented as being either competent or incompetent at performing the task. That person provided random feedback to the participant through facial expressions indicating agreement, disagreement or uncertainty. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation by rating their confidence in their answer. Results revealed that participants' confidence was higher following agreements. Interestingly, this effect was merely reduced but not canceled for the incompetent individual, even though participants were able to perceive the individual's incompetence. Moreover, perceived agreement induced zygomaticus activity, but only when the feedback was provided for difficult trials by the competent individual. This last result strongly suggests that people implicitly appraise the relevance of social feedback with respect to their current goal. Together, our findings suggest that people always integrate social agreement into their metacognitive evaluations, even when epistemic vigilance mechanisms alert them to the risk of being misinformed.
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Neuropsychologie EA 2027, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis France.
authors.forename: Amélie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jacquot
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives INSERM U960, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris France.
authors.forename: Terry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Eskenazi
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Socio-Psychologie et Management du Sport EA 4180, Université de Bourgogne, Dijon France.
authors.forename: Edith
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Sales-Wuillemin
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire ICONES EA 4699, Université de Normandie, Mont-Saint-Aignan France.
authors.forename: Benoît
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Montalan
authors.affiliation: Institut Jean Nicod, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris France.
authors.forename: Joëlle
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Proust
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives INSERM U960, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris France.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Grèzes
authors.affiliation: Laboratoire de Psychopathologie et Neuropsychologie EA 2027, Université Paris 8, Saint-Denis France.
authors.forename: Laurence
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Conty
keywords: confidence; electromyography; epistemic reliability; facial expression; metacognition; social influence