Confidence over competence: Real-time integration of social information in human continuous perceptual decision-making

Abstract

Human perceptual decision-making is susceptible to social influences. To determine if and how individuals opportunistically integrate real-time social information about noisy stimuli into their judgment, we tracked perceptual accuracy and confidence in social (dyadic) and non-social (solo) settings using a novel continuous perceptual report (CPR) task with peri-decision wagering. In the dyadic setting, most participants showed a higher degree of perceptual confidence. In contrast, average accuracy did not improve compared to solo performance. Underlying these net effects, partners in a dyad exhibit mutual convergence of accuracy and confidence, benefiting less competent or confident individuals, at the expense of the better-performing partner. In conclusion, real-time social information asymmetrically shapes human perceptual decision-making, with most dyads expressing more confidence without a matching gain in overall competence.