ArticlePsychological medicine2026
Gender and anxiety reveal distinct computational sources of underconfidence.
Article in Psychological medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Building worlds of your own: the functional role of metacognitive bias in metacognition.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Distorted learning from local metacognition supports transdiagnostic underconfidence.Nature communications · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
backgroundConfidence exhibits systematic individual differences across mental health, gender, and age. However, it remains unknown whether these distinct sources of metacognitive bias have common or distinct computational origins.
methodsTo address this question, we developed a novel dynamic computational model of metacognition to study the temporal evolution of underconfidence associated with individual differences in transdiagnostic anxiety symptoms and gender in samples of online participants (total
resultsWe found that underconfidence associated with anxiety symptoms became more prominent the longer individuals took to make metacognitive judgments - suggesting that it is exacerbated by additional time for introspection. In contrast, gender-related underconfidence decreased with greater metacognitive judgment time - suggesting that additional time for introspection is able to remediate prepotent biases. Our computational model of confidence explained these effects - while both gender and anxiety symptoms involved shifts in confidence criteria, only anxiety symptoms involved a temporal accumulation of negatively biased evidence about one's ability.
conclusionsOur study reveals multiple computational pathways to the formation of underconfidence, in turn highlighting specific potential mechanisms for its remediation.
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