Center for Behavioral Decision Research

CBDR : Seminar Series : Seminar by Norbert Schwarz

From the dynamics of the mind to inferences about the world: Another look at metacognition

	presented by Norbert Schwarz (University of Michigan)


	Thursday, October 22	link to paper
	12pm
	Baker A53	link to Speaker's Site

	Abstract:

	Metacognition research usually focuses on what people infer from the dynamics of their mental processes about the state of their own knowledge. Taking a different direction, I explore how the dynamics of our mental processes inform judgments about the external world. Lay theories of mental processes play a key role in this inference process and allow us to move from subjective processing experiences to a wide range of inferences about the world. I conceptualize these processes in the context of a feelings-as-information approach and highlight the role of naïve theories that are recruited by the task at hand. Throughout, people are highly sensitive to their feelings but utterly insensitive to where their feelings come from. They perceive their feelings as bearing on whatever they are thinking about and use them as a source of information. What they conclude from a given feeling depends on the lay theory applied, rendering inferences highly malleable. As a result, the same processing difficulty induced by a hard to read print font can convey, for example, that a product is innovative, special, harmful, or ugly, with differential downstream effects on preference and willingness to pay. This is an overview talk. Related papers are available at the metacognition section of my homepage: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/norbert.schwarz/metacognitive_experiences

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