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Category: Project

Description: The present study is an attempt to provide empirical evidence for the affective reactions following different types of feedback after a biased heuristic solution in two well-known decision-making tasks (the “Linda problem” and the “Disease Scenario"). The sample consisted of 596 undergraduate and postgraduate university students. Participants were asked to choose among alternative answers the answer they considered correct and to report how difficult it was to find the answer in each scenario and how confident they were about their answer on a 4-point Likert scale. High confidence errors were found to consist, given the non-significant differences in participants' confidence ratings for selecting correct or biased- heuristic solutions. Performance in each task was followed by two external feedbacks: a "low informative", namely if the answer is correct or not, and a "high informative", in which a detailed justification of the correct answer was provided by presenting the logical principle underlying the correct answer. Self-reported epistemic emotions of surprise, confusion and curiosity were used as a measurement of the affective reactions and were reported twice, immediately after each type of feedback. The results indicated the significant role of high informative feedback for decreasing epistemic emotions, mainly that of surprise.