ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
Confirmation bias is adaptive when coupled with efficient metacognition.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- Modeling metacognition and executive functions in the metacognitive wisconsin card sorting test using the neuropsychological digital-twin method.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Building worlds of your own: the functional role of metacognitive bias in metacognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Exploring Meta-Reasoning Propositional Confidence in Conspiratorial Beliefs and Socio-Cognitive Polarization.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- When common cognitive biases impact debriefing conversations.Advances in simulation (London, England) · 2024Article
- Thinking about Believing: Can Metacognitive Reflection Encourage Belief Updating?Journal of Intelligence · 2024Article
- The roots of polarization in the individual reward system.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Metacognition, public health compliance, and vaccination willingness.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Age-related decreases in global metacognition are independent of local metacognition and task performance.Cognition · 2023Article
- On the assumptions behind metacognitive measurements: Implications for theory and practice.Journal of vision · 2022Article
- On the Interplay of Data and Cognitive Bias in Crisis Information Management: An Exploratory Study on Epidemic Response.Information systems frontiers : a journal of research and innovation · 2022Article
- Noise, Fake News, and Tenacious Bayesians.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Computational and neurocognitive approaches to the political brain: key insights and future avenues for political neuroscience.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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Abstract
Biases in the consideration of evidence can reduce the chances of consensus between people with different viewpoints. While such altered information processing typically leads to detrimental performance in laboratory tasks, the ubiquitous nature of confirmation bias makes it unlikely that selective information processing is universally harmful. Here, we suggest that confirmation bias is adaptive to the extent that agents have good metacognition, allowing them to downweight contradictory information when correct but still able to seek new information when they realize they are wrong. Using simulation-based modelling, we explore how the adaptiveness of holding a confirmation bias depends on such metacognitive insight. We find that the behavioural consequences of selective information processing are systematically affected by agents' introspective abilities. Strikingly, we find that selective information processing can even improve decision-making when compared with unbiased evidence accumulation, as long as it is accompanied by good metacognition. These results further suggest that interventions which boost people's metacognition might be efficient in alleviating the negative effects of selective information processing on issues such as political polarization. This article is part of the theme issue 'The political brain: neurocognitive and computational mechanisms'.
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