Subjective confidence acts as an internal cost-benefit factor when choosing between tasks

Upon making a decision, we typically have a sense of the likelihood that the decision we reached was a good one; that is, a degree of confidence in our choice. In a series of five experiments, we tested the hypothesis that confidence acts as an intrinsic cost-benefit factor when choosing between tasks, biasing people toward situations in which they experience higher confidence. Participants performed a task-selection paradigm in which they chose on each trial between two perceptual-judgment tasks that were matched for objective difficulty but differed in participants’ experienced confidence, with confidence manipulated via differences in the strength of postdecisional evidence. The results show that participants exhibited a preference for tasks in which they reported higher confidence. The effect of confidence on task selection went above and beyond simple error detection, with people not only avoiding tasks in which they believed they made an error, but also tending to select tasks in which they experienced higher confidence in their correct responses. Moreover, preference for high-confidence tasks was evident even when external feedback was provided on every trial. Collectively, these results indicate that subjective confidence guides choices of which situations and tasks to engage with, as a valuable indicator of likely success