Decisions are almost always preceded by information search aimed at finding the option that is most preferable. How much information one acquires before making a decision should depend on how sure one wants to be. This aspired confidence level presumably plays an important role in regulating pre-decisional search.
To investigate this role, we conducted two experiments (Ntotal=238) aimed at manipulating participants’ general confidence, in which they made binary decisions based on self-truncated information and reported their confidence.
In the first experiment, one condition received negatively distorted decision feedback while the other received accurate feedback before completing the remainder of the decisions without any additional feedback. As expected, participants in the distorted-feedback condition collected significantly more information. Mixed-model-analyses indicate that they needed more evidence to reach the same confidence level as the control condition.
The second experiment manipulated the ratio of information cost and payoff across two blocks of 60 decisions each, such that information was relatively more expensive in the second block. Again, mixed-model analyses indicated that in the second block participants needed more evidence to reach similar confidence levels. The adaptivity of this behaviour and its potential will be the focus of the discussion.