PSE Internal Seminar

Du 11/02/2022 de 12:30 à 13:30

R2-01

CASELLA Alessandra(Columbia)
LEBRETON Maël(PSE)

Incentive motivation differently affects beliefs and confidence judgments.

Alessandra Casella (co-authors: Joseph Campbell, Lucas de Lara, Jeffrey Guo, Michelle Jiang, Victoria Mooers, & Dilip Ravindran): US courts have used Cumulative Voting (CV) to remedy violations of the Voting Rights Acts and increase minority representation. Under CV, each voter has as many votes as open positions but can cumulate votes on as few candidates as desired. Although each voter is treated equally, theory predicts that CV increases both minority’s turnout relative to the majority, and the minority’s share of seats won. Liquid Democracy (LD) is celebrated by supporters as the golden medium between direct and representative democracy. Under LD, decisions are taken by referendum, but voters are allowed to delegate their votes. When experts are correctly identified, theory shows that the outcome can be superior to simple majority voting. In the lab, CV's theoretical promise is satisfied: the minority's turnout and its share of seats both increases. LD, however, falls short of its potential: systematic over-delegation leads to its underperformance relative to simple majority. Maël Lebreton (co-authors: Nahuel Salem-Garcia & Sébastien Massoni): Countless reports of over-optimism, overconfidence, wishful-thinking and desirability biases suggest that a general motivated-cognition bias distort all beliefs uniformly. Here, we provide evidence against this view, and demonstrate that motivational biases differentially affect proper beliefs, i.e. probability judgments over (external) states, and confidence judgements, i.e. probability judgments over ones’ own actions or statements being correct. Across multiple experiments, we systematically manipulate the agency of decisions over ambiguous states-of-the-world and the valence of monetary incentives for accurate probabilistic judgments about the correctness of those decisions. We identify a clear effect of the net incentive value on confidence, which vanishes when considering beliefs. These results, which falsify the most general interpretations of motivated-belief theories, suggest that beliefs and confidence stem from fundamentally different cognitive mechanisms. Consequently, although similarly ubiquitous and apparently related, overconfidence and (over)optimism biases might have different causes and remedies.