The effect of consensuality on metacognitive judgments in syllogistic reasoning

The aim of this study was to examine the relation of the consensuality of answers in syllogistic reasoning problems to metacognitive judgments and response times. In two experiments, participants (N=126) solved syllogistic problems and made metacognitive judgments (judgment of confidence in the correctness of the answer and judgment of task difficulty), after or before solving each problem. Intraindividual correlation coefficients (Goodman-Kruskal gamma coefficient) between reasoning accuracy and metacognitive judgments and between answer consensuality and metacognitive judgments were computed from the joint data of both experiments. Mean gamma coefficients were higher for consensuality than for reasoning accuracy both for judgments of confidence and judgments of task difficulty. Also, consensual answers were given more quickly than non-consensual answers. The results indicate that reasoners, instead of monitoring their actual performance, seem to rely on different type of cues while making metacognitive judgments in syllogistic reasoning. Both consensuality and its relation to metacognitive judgments could be the outcome of processes of the generation of possible answers while solving syllogistic reasoning problems