It’s decided: decisive people no more accurate than self-doubters
It’s a trait best seen in the eager pub quizzer – a tendency to leap to an answer without a shadow of a doubt.
Now researchers have suggested that while people who have little difficulty making decisions are more confident in their choices, they are no more accurate than those who feel more torn.
Writing in the journal Plos One, researchers revealed how they conducted experiments to explore potential differences between people who tend to be decisive, known as actionoriented people, and those who struggle to commit to a choice, known as state-oriented people.
“What we found is that confidence was the only thing that was different,” said Dr Wojciech Zajkowski, the first author of the research, who is now based at the Riken social decision science laboratory in Japan.
“Meaning state-oriented people were just as good, and as fast at making those small choices, as were the actionoriented people. The action-oriented people were, however, much more confident.”
The team asked participants, who had been assessed – through screening questionnaires – to be either very decisive or not, to complete a number of tasks.
Among them, 58 participants completed an experiment of two parts.
In the first task, they were presented with white dots moving on a black screen and asked to indicate whether they thought the majority were moving to the left or the right, while in another task they were shown an obscured picture of a house or a face and asked to decide which of the two the picture represented.
In a second experiment, 56 participants were asked to rate their preference for images of snacks and then asked to pick which of a pair of the images was larger, or which of two items they preferred.
In all experiments, participants were asked how confident they were in their choice immediately after making a decision.
As well as analysing the initial outcomes, the team used computer modelling to assess processes that are not directly observable. “Like how fast people are processing information, or how much evidence they need to make a decision,” said Zajkowski.
He said state-oriented people often struggled with attaining their goals and second-guessed themselves more, and the research suggested this may be down to being less confident about their choices.
“It is easy to see how this can generalise to more trivial matters such as preparing for an exam, exercising or learning a new skill, where low confidence in meaningful progress can discourage regular practice,” he said.