Interpersonal alignment of shared beliefs: computational, behavioural and neural evidence
When uncertainty prevails and honest communication is in everybody's best interest, comparing confidence can help people make better joint decisions because, often, opinions expressed with higher confidence tend to be more accurate. However, different people mean very different things when they express the same level of confidence. This complicates the comparison and can lead to catastrophic joint decisions. Therefore, to combine their opinions usefully, group members must adapt to each other’s idiosyncratic peculiarities and express their confidence according to a common metric. I will present our recent work employing computational modelling, behavioural psychophysics and EEG to examine the cognitive basis of these inter-individual differences in confidence and how people arrive at a joint understanding of one another’s expression of uncertainty.