This talk goes over the results of a new behavioural study into social influence and perceptual decision-making. Motivated by research showing that group decision-making is dependent on the communication of confidence, we show that this confidence is not solely dependent on task characteristics and underlying ability. Modelling self-perception of ability as a Bayesian inference process directed both externally (via social comparison) and internally, our results show that the influence of a superior-performing other can affect responses at both the first-order and metacognitive level, affecting learning of a task with time-varying stochastic characteristics. This has implications for the nature of metacognitive processes, as well as for psychopathologies involving negative cognitive styles and disorders of social cognition.

James Livermore is a PhD student at the University of Sussex. He has studied cognitive neuroscience, behavioural economics and psychology, and previously researched agent-based simulation in behavioural game theory at the University of Warwick.