Confidence does not equal competence: Socially dominant individuals are more confident in their decisions without being more accurate

Abstract

High status within social hierarchies is often the reserve of socially dominant individuals. Faster responses have been identified as a cognitive predisposition of socially dominant individuals, thought to confer an advantage by allowing them to act first in social contexts. Response speed is also thought to reflect decision confidence, but this has not been directly investigated in relation to social dominance. Moreover, personality traits, such as extraversion, may show a similar relationship with decision-making speed and confidence and may explain any relationship with social dominance. Confidence is thought to be domain specific and it is therefore important to assess whether any association between decision confidence and social dominance, is also observed in other cognitive domains. Across three studies, we assessed performance on a two-choice statistical learning decision-making task and a self-referential memory task. To measure metacognitive bias, we included confidence for both decisions and memory traces. We also included a measure of extraversion to investigate whether these two related personality traits explain overlapping or unique variance in task performance. Across three studies, social dominance and extraversion were positively correlated. Both social dominance and extraversion independently predicted variance on confidence for decisions, with stronger evidence for a unique role for social dominance, but no relationship was identified for confidence in memory traces.